Tuesday, July 07, 2009
On Why Those Who Hold to Resistible Grace Must Hold to a Strong Form of Depravity
Even when Arminians pretend that they believe in Total Depravity, this doesn’t cash out the way it does in Calvinism. Calvinistic views are quite simple: because man is depraved, then it is only the grace of God that can change the sinner to a believer, and when that happens man is truly changed and thus he responds automatically in faith. Because God initiates this on whom He will, and because the change is effectual, those who receive this regenerating grace are guaranteed salvation.
The Arminian view is quite different, of course. Even those who hold to depravity do not hold to God’s grace being effectual grace, for such grace can still be resisted by the sinner. Thus, an Arminian who believes in depravity is left with the following system: Because man is depraved, then it is only the grace of God that can enabled a sinner to potentially believe in God, and God does this for everyone (or at least all those who have the opportunity to hear the Gospel). Arminians who do not believe in depravity have nearly the same system: man can potentially believe in God, and God does this everyone, etc.
I want to focus a bit on the concept of irresistible grace. First, it should be noted that the grace referred to as irresistible is only the regenerating grace of God; it is not everything that God graciously gives to people (elect or reprobate). Thus, when Calvinists speaks of irresistible grace, it is only saying that the regenerating power of God is effectual and must succeed at what it does: namely, bringing spiritual life to the dead sinner.
It should be obvious that this concept of grace cannot be the same concept of grace that an Arminian believes can be resisted, for in a sense it is little more than God “flipping a life-switch”*—something that happens instantaneously, and has an immediate change. Just as flipping a light switch, for all intents and purposes, instantly causes a light to go on, so God flipping a life-switch immediately causes the dead person to be regenerated.
[* I think I must trademark “life-switch” before Joel Osteen steals it.]
In any case, it is obviously impossible to resist being converted from death to life. It’s an action that happens without your input. Once you were dead, then you were alive. To paraphrase Steven Wright in reverse: Everyone’s regenerated instantly. You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re alive!
The key is, of course, that the living soul is radically different from the dead soul. They do not operate the same way. The dead soul is set on death and cannot submit to God’s will (Romans 8:5-8). The living soul, however, is the slave of Christ (Romans 6, especially verses 11-14). In short, being regenerated in Christ is to be dead to sin.
The Arminian view is not like this. In the Arminian view (those who believe in depravity, at least), God in essence sets man’s will to “neutral.” While man was once depraved, God sets him in a position where he can either choose to do good or evil. (Those who don’t hold to depravity believe this is where man is by default.) The Arminian seems to think that he avoids all the emotional problems associated with God’s sovereignty by allowing man to take some kind of role here. Therefore, the Arminian believes that if someone rejects God, it spares God blame (and this brings the Arminian emotional comfort).
But ask a simple question here. What kind of person would reject the grace of God? What kind of person resists the Holy Spirit?
We know that the righteous person submits to the will of God. We know that the mind that is enslaved to sin is hostile to the will of God and cannot submit to the will of God. Therefore, if someone cannot submit to God’s grace, is that not itself an indication that the person is depraved? In other words, if we resist God’s grace, it can only be because we are depraved!
The reason is because our choices do not determine our nature, but rather our nature determines our choices. This is important, and seen in such passages as Luke 7:16-20.
Thus, who does not resist God’s grace? The healthy tree. Who does resist God’s grace? The diseased tree.
But this bears a great problem for the Arminian. If a man chooses to believe in God, then it is because he is already a healthy tree—God’s grace has been irresistible, for the sinner went from spiritual death to spiritual life! But if he chooses to reject God, then it is because he remains a diseased tree—he hasn’t had his depravity removed at all! A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit, so either God’s grace was effectual or it was not and the man is still depraved.
The only way around this would be to claim that there must be a tree that exists in a state that is neither healthy nor diseased, a concept utterly foreign to the Scriptures. Indeed, Christ says plainly: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
Assuming everything from an Arminian perspective, we’re left with:
1. Those who resist grace are depraved.
2. There are those who resist grace.
3. Therefore, there are those who are depraved.
4. Those who do not resist grace are not depraved.
5. There are those who do not resist grace.
6. Therefore, there are those who are not depraved.
7. Grace changes people from depraved to non-depraved.
8. Grace can be resisted.
9. Grace is given to all.
10. But those who resist grace are depraved (1)
11. Therefore, if grace is resisted, then at least one of (7), (8), or (9) must be false.
So I merely ask our Arminian commenters (even BSman, if he wants to answer this specific question can comment): which of those options (7), (8), or (9) is wrong?
The Arminian view is quite different, of course. Even those who hold to depravity do not hold to God’s grace being effectual grace, for such grace can still be resisted by the sinner. Thus, an Arminian who believes in depravity is left with the following system: Because man is depraved, then it is only the grace of God that can enabled a sinner to potentially believe in God, and God does this for everyone (or at least all those who have the opportunity to hear the Gospel). Arminians who do not believe in depravity have nearly the same system: man can potentially believe in God, and God does this everyone, etc.
I want to focus a bit on the concept of irresistible grace. First, it should be noted that the grace referred to as irresistible is only the regenerating grace of God; it is not everything that God graciously gives to people (elect or reprobate). Thus, when Calvinists speaks of irresistible grace, it is only saying that the regenerating power of God is effectual and must succeed at what it does: namely, bringing spiritual life to the dead sinner.
It should be obvious that this concept of grace cannot be the same concept of grace that an Arminian believes can be resisted, for in a sense it is little more than God “flipping a life-switch”*—something that happens instantaneously, and has an immediate change. Just as flipping a light switch, for all intents and purposes, instantly causes a light to go on, so God flipping a life-switch immediately causes the dead person to be regenerated.
[* I think I must trademark “life-switch” before Joel Osteen steals it.]
In any case, it is obviously impossible to resist being converted from death to life. It’s an action that happens without your input. Once you were dead, then you were alive. To paraphrase Steven Wright in reverse: Everyone’s regenerated instantly. You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re alive!
The key is, of course, that the living soul is radically different from the dead soul. They do not operate the same way. The dead soul is set on death and cannot submit to God’s will (Romans 8:5-8). The living soul, however, is the slave of Christ (Romans 6, especially verses 11-14). In short, being regenerated in Christ is to be dead to sin.
The Arminian view is not like this. In the Arminian view (those who believe in depravity, at least), God in essence sets man’s will to “neutral.” While man was once depraved, God sets him in a position where he can either choose to do good or evil. (Those who don’t hold to depravity believe this is where man is by default.) The Arminian seems to think that he avoids all the emotional problems associated with God’s sovereignty by allowing man to take some kind of role here. Therefore, the Arminian believes that if someone rejects God, it spares God blame (and this brings the Arminian emotional comfort).
But ask a simple question here. What kind of person would reject the grace of God? What kind of person resists the Holy Spirit?
We know that the righteous person submits to the will of God. We know that the mind that is enslaved to sin is hostile to the will of God and cannot submit to the will of God. Therefore, if someone cannot submit to God’s grace, is that not itself an indication that the person is depraved? In other words, if we resist God’s grace, it can only be because we are depraved!
The reason is because our choices do not determine our nature, but rather our nature determines our choices. This is important, and seen in such passages as Luke 7:16-20.
Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.The fruit (that is, what people do) is dependent upon the nature of the tree (that is, what people are). The key is this: “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit.” Likewise, a diseased tree cannot bear good fruit. The fruit shows us whether or not the tree is healthy or diseased, even if the two trees look identical.
Thus, who does not resist God’s grace? The healthy tree. Who does resist God’s grace? The diseased tree.
But this bears a great problem for the Arminian. If a man chooses to believe in God, then it is because he is already a healthy tree—God’s grace has been irresistible, for the sinner went from spiritual death to spiritual life! But if he chooses to reject God, then it is because he remains a diseased tree—he hasn’t had his depravity removed at all! A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit, so either God’s grace was effectual or it was not and the man is still depraved.
The only way around this would be to claim that there must be a tree that exists in a state that is neither healthy nor diseased, a concept utterly foreign to the Scriptures. Indeed, Christ says plainly: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
Assuming everything from an Arminian perspective, we’re left with:
1. Those who resist grace are depraved.
2. There are those who resist grace.
3. Therefore, there are those who are depraved.
4. Those who do not resist grace are not depraved.
5. There are those who do not resist grace.
6. Therefore, there are those who are not depraved.
7. Grace changes people from depraved to non-depraved.
8. Grace can be resisted.
9. Grace is given to all.
10. But those who resist grace are depraved (1)
11. Therefore, if grace is resisted, then at least one of (7), (8), or (9) must be false.
So I merely ask our Arminian commenters (even BSman, if he wants to answer this specific question can comment): which of those options (7), (8), or (9) is wrong?
Monday, July 06, 2009
The consistency of an Arminian: BSMANgreeneggsandHAM
On Dan's blog Bossmanham complains about me this way:
I also love how Paul is declaring himself the winner of your debates. What's truly funny is he actually believes that since he is declaring himself the winner, he actually is the winner. I am actually laughing out loud right now.
On T-blog, in the comments section of Peter's post he says this:
I'm the only one producing logically cohesive arguments. Very Christian of you BTW, Petey.
You couldn't script better stuff than this.
I also love how Paul is declaring himself the winner of your debates. What's truly funny is he actually believes that since he is declaring himself the winner, he actually is the winner. I am actually laughing out loud right now.
On T-blog, in the comments section of Peter's post he says this:
I'm the only one producing logically cohesive arguments. Very Christian of you BTW, Petey.
You couldn't script better stuff than this.
Choose The Best: More on a failed Arminian argument
Hot on the heals of of me presenting Dan these defeaters:
1. Some of the top libertarian action theorists in the world disagree with him.
2. The empirical evidence suggests that not all "common men" are libertarians.
3. About a dozen of the most respected dictionaries define "choose" in terms wholly compatible (!) with compatibilism.
4. Dan's ad hoc definition of "common men" (i.e., all the members of Israel and the Church from all time) allows some of the world's most uncommon men to be "common men".
5. Dan's position implies that one needs to be a libertarian in order to be saved---so much for the uber love of Arminianism!
I now bring Dan another defeater.
2 Kings 10:
1 Now there were in Samaria seventy sons of the house of Ahab. So Jehu wrote letters and sent them to Samaria: to the officials of Jezreel, [a] to the elders and to the guardians of Ahab's children. He said, 2 "As soon as this letter reaches you, since your master's sons are with you and you have chariots and horses, a fortified city and weapons, 3 choose the best and most worthy of your master's sons and set him on his father's throne. Then fight for your master's house."
Notice the very common conception of "choosing the best." The best, by definition(!), implies no other alternative. So, out of the mass of 70 sons, the guardians were to choose the best and most worthy. Say they lined the group up, 1 - 70, and chose number 10. To the question "was it a live option for you to pick number 22?" is the answer, "No." Why not? Well, he wasn't the best. "The best" implies one out of a group, with the rest not being live options as they are the second, third, fourth, and so on "best." So, 1 - 9 and 11-70 were not live options. But the Bible calls this a choice. In fact, the understanding used here is consistent with the majority of dictionaries out there: select one or more from out of a larger number.
I would also go as far as to say that out of the 70 there was at least one who was obviously not the best or most worthy. Maybe he was ugly, weak, had a bad leg, dumb, and just smelled bad too. So, he was obviously not "the best" yet he was inculded among the choices, or ones to choose from! On Dan's assumptiuons he would have to be a possible "best," but the problem is that he obviously wans't!
Oh, and I also note the Arminian "yes men" at Dan's blog complaining that I have admitted that my arguments defeat Dan (I guess they'd rather have me admit that Dan's arguments beat mine?). They complain about this but have not bothered to defend Dan's argument. If any of them think they can respond to my arguments, let them use this combox. Here's the resolution:
[R] Dan says that "the dictionary" defines "choose" with "possible alternative" as an essential element to it. This point is CRITICAL to Dan's argument going through. I cite numerous well-respected dictionaries which say otherwise. How did I not destroy Dan's (bad) argument?
Got a defense for Dan?
1. Some of the top libertarian action theorists in the world disagree with him.
2. The empirical evidence suggests that not all "common men" are libertarians.
3. About a dozen of the most respected dictionaries define "choose" in terms wholly compatible (!) with compatibilism.
4. Dan's ad hoc definition of "common men" (i.e., all the members of Israel and the Church from all time) allows some of the world's most uncommon men to be "common men".
5. Dan's position implies that one needs to be a libertarian in order to be saved---so much for the uber love of Arminianism!
I now bring Dan another defeater.
2 Kings 10:
1 Now there were in Samaria seventy sons of the house of Ahab. So Jehu wrote letters and sent them to Samaria: to the officials of Jezreel, [a] to the elders and to the guardians of Ahab's children. He said, 2 "As soon as this letter reaches you, since your master's sons are with you and you have chariots and horses, a fortified city and weapons, 3 choose the best and most worthy of your master's sons and set him on his father's throne. Then fight for your master's house."
Notice the very common conception of "choosing the best." The best, by definition(!), implies no other alternative. So, out of the mass of 70 sons, the guardians were to choose the best and most worthy. Say they lined the group up, 1 - 70, and chose number 10. To the question "was it a live option for you to pick number 22?" is the answer, "No." Why not? Well, he wasn't the best. "The best" implies one out of a group, with the rest not being live options as they are the second, third, fourth, and so on "best." So, 1 - 9 and 11-70 were not live options. But the Bible calls this a choice. In fact, the understanding used here is consistent with the majority of dictionaries out there: select one or more from out of a larger number.
I would also go as far as to say that out of the 70 there was at least one who was obviously not the best or most worthy. Maybe he was ugly, weak, had a bad leg, dumb, and just smelled bad too. So, he was obviously not "the best" yet he was inculded among the choices, or ones to choose from! On Dan's assumptiuons he would have to be a possible "best," but the problem is that he obviously wans't!
Oh, and I also note the Arminian "yes men" at Dan's blog complaining that I have admitted that my arguments defeat Dan (I guess they'd rather have me admit that Dan's arguments beat mine?). They complain about this but have not bothered to defend Dan's argument. If any of them think they can respond to my arguments, let them use this combox. Here's the resolution:
[R] Dan says that "the dictionary" defines "choose" with "possible alternative" as an essential element to it. This point is CRITICAL to Dan's argument going through. I cite numerous well-respected dictionaries which say otherwise. How did I not destroy Dan's (bad) argument?
Got a defense for Dan?
"Honor Thy Father" for Grownups
"Or, how not to be a deadbeat son or daughter."
Steve well notes: "One small caveat with the article: 'passing on' is not just a euphemism. It's a Christian testimony to the afterlife."
HT: Justin Taylor.
Steve well notes: "One small caveat with the article: 'passing on' is not just a euphemism. It's a Christian testimony to the afterlife."
HT: Justin Taylor.
Just a Few of the Trivially Easy Ways by Which God Could Get People to Believe in Him without Violating Their Precious Free Will®
The following couplet is brought to you by Pelagian-Off. When you’re drifting toward the shore of Pelagia, shove off™.
If there is one thing which I insist must be,
It is that God needs be smarter than me. God has an image problem. When you look for Him, you can’t see Him. Yes, we know that He’s everywhere, but He’s invisible. In this regard, He’s almost, but not quiet, completely unlike Barry’s role in GM.
But I digress.
If our recent spate of Arminian commenters are to be believed, God wants to save everyone. I mean, He really, really, really wants to save every single man, woman, and child (even Britney!) who has ever walked the face of the planet, be it past, present, or even future. How much does He really, really, really want to do this? Spread your arms wide. See how far they go? God’s want goes farther.
But God happens to be invisible. What is an invisible being to do? I mean, if you were invisible, how would you convince people (other than the IRS, who would tax you even if you didn’t exist) that you exist? This could be troubling. Especially if you can’t touch other people either, or say their name, or interact with objects. You’d be like Sam from Ghost, and who wants that?
But what if you were omnipotent? Why, then not only could you touch people, interact with objects, talk to them…why, you could even make yourself visible!
Today when I went out and picked up my lunch, I was fully convinced the woman at the counter existed. I believed she exists because I saw her there. And my having seen her didn’t violate my Free Will® in any manner, did it? Nope. Not at all.
So really all God would have to do to convince people that He exists is: show up.
You know, when two pagans are making out in the backseat of a car, God could suddenly pop up in the driver’s seat and say, “You kids know you shouldn’t be doing that. By the way, I exist.” I’m fairly certain that would scare the hell out of them. They might even become Methodists.
Come down this path with me now. See that giant white orb in the night sky? There aren’t very many people who look at the moon and say, “That doesn’t exist.” Those who do say that vote multiple times in every election, and are rightly shunned by the rest of society. But they’re a minority. You have to admit, the vast majority of people believe the moon is real (some even believe people walked on it once).
Yeah, I suppose it is possible that someone could see God standing there and still think, “He’s no better than Aunt Wilma, who at least bakes apple pie for Thanksgiving.” But if you said that, couldn’t God bake you an apple pie in response? I mean, what’s stopping Him? And maybe you’d say: “I would like you better if you were four feet tall and green.” What’s to stop God from doing that for you? Whatever you needed God to look like (a giant puppy dog with a rainbow collar and sparkles on his nose) God could be just that! He’s got da power.
Come along further then. How many of you have ever looked at a vending machine and said, “I don’t believe that piece of junk will give me my selection if I put money in it” and then, when you put money in it, you got your selection after all? Would you then say, “I don’t believe that piece of junk will give me my selection if I put money in it” the next time you see it? Perhaps. But suppose you do this a thousand times (because you’re really hungry, see also: rich), and it always gave you your selection. Would you not agree that the machine is reliable and you can trust in it?
Why can’t God do that with atheists? If an atheist says, “God, I want you to jump through hoop A and then I’ll believe” why couldn’t God jump through hoop A? And if the atheist adds more hoops, it’s not like God will get tired (Omnipotence, baby!). And if He can’t acquiesce for logical reasons (suppose the atheist says, “God, if you exist, I want you to raise John McCain from the dead”) He could at least give the reason (“McCain is already undead”).
Now I may be confused, but it seems to me that more people would believe in God if they could see Him and He responded to them then currently believe in Him now when they can’t see Him and He doesn’t seem to respond to them. And the simple action of seeing what’s in front of your eyes is not a violation of Free Will®. Appearing would be a trivially simple task for an omnipotent being, wouldn’t it?
Naturally, in the past I’ve made similar arguments. One response I got was that God’s showing up wouldn’t make any difference. That’s because apparently every time someone shows up we are supposed to automatically assume we are hallucinating.
But the objection continued that it was due to sin that it wouldn’t make any difference. But I thought there was this thing calledpeeved prevailing prevenient grace, which is kinda like an insurance policy from Progressive: namely, if you have insurance, you can drive your dad’s Yugo. PG is like that, only you get to pick if God will drive or if t3h debil wit t3h houndz of hellx0r will. Which makes me wonder…if PG works, then why would God’s appearing or not appearing have any relevance to what driver you pick to haul down the Interstate is 17.3 mph? I mean, when the insurance agent shows up and says, “You can fill out this card and drive” you don’t say, “You don’t exist” in response.
Oh you do. In that case, I have a voter registration card I need you to fill out. No, no. You can have several.
It is that God needs be smarter than me.
But I digress.
If our recent spate of Arminian commenters are to be believed, God wants to save everyone. I mean, He really, really, really wants to save every single man, woman, and child (even Britney!) who has ever walked the face of the planet, be it past, present, or even future. How much does He really, really, really want to do this? Spread your arms wide. See how far they go? God’s want goes farther.
But God happens to be invisible. What is an invisible being to do? I mean, if you were invisible, how would you convince people (other than the IRS, who would tax you even if you didn’t exist) that you exist? This could be troubling. Especially if you can’t touch other people either, or say their name, or interact with objects. You’d be like Sam from Ghost, and who wants that?
But what if you were omnipotent? Why, then not only could you touch people, interact with objects, talk to them…why, you could even make yourself visible!
Today when I went out and picked up my lunch, I was fully convinced the woman at the counter existed. I believed she exists because I saw her there. And my having seen her didn’t violate my Free Will® in any manner, did it? Nope. Not at all.
So really all God would have to do to convince people that He exists is: show up.
You know, when two pagans are making out in the backseat of a car, God could suddenly pop up in the driver’s seat and say, “You kids know you shouldn’t be doing that. By the way, I exist.” I’m fairly certain that would scare the hell out of them. They might even become Methodists.
Come down this path with me now. See that giant white orb in the night sky? There aren’t very many people who look at the moon and say, “That doesn’t exist.” Those who do say that vote multiple times in every election, and are rightly shunned by the rest of society. But they’re a minority. You have to admit, the vast majority of people believe the moon is real (some even believe people walked on it once).
Yeah, I suppose it is possible that someone could see God standing there and still think, “He’s no better than Aunt Wilma, who at least bakes apple pie for Thanksgiving.” But if you said that, couldn’t God bake you an apple pie in response? I mean, what’s stopping Him? And maybe you’d say: “I would like you better if you were four feet tall and green.” What’s to stop God from doing that for you? Whatever you needed God to look like (a giant puppy dog with a rainbow collar and sparkles on his nose) God could be just that! He’s got da power.
Come along further then. How many of you have ever looked at a vending machine and said, “I don’t believe that piece of junk will give me my selection if I put money in it” and then, when you put money in it, you got your selection after all? Would you then say, “I don’t believe that piece of junk will give me my selection if I put money in it” the next time you see it? Perhaps. But suppose you do this a thousand times (because you’re really hungry, see also: rich), and it always gave you your selection. Would you not agree that the machine is reliable and you can trust in it?
Why can’t God do that with atheists? If an atheist says, “God, I want you to jump through hoop A and then I’ll believe” why couldn’t God jump through hoop A? And if the atheist adds more hoops, it’s not like God will get tired (Omnipotence, baby!). And if He can’t acquiesce for logical reasons (suppose the atheist says, “God, if you exist, I want you to raise John McCain from the dead”) He could at least give the reason (“McCain is already undead”).
Now I may be confused, but it seems to me that more people would believe in God if they could see Him and He responded to them then currently believe in Him now when they can’t see Him and He doesn’t seem to respond to them. And the simple action of seeing what’s in front of your eyes is not a violation of Free Will®. Appearing would be a trivially simple task for an omnipotent being, wouldn’t it?
Naturally, in the past I’ve made similar arguments. One response I got was that God’s showing up wouldn’t make any difference. That’s because apparently every time someone shows up we are supposed to automatically assume we are hallucinating.
But the objection continued that it was due to sin that it wouldn’t make any difference. But I thought there was this thing called
Oh you do. In that case, I have a voter registration card I need you to fill out. No, no. You can have several.
Some Clean Up
Since I rendered Dan the Arminian's argument from the dictionary dead, all that's left is to mop up the mess left by the twitching corpse of an argument. The post Dan is responding to (not my latest, it's this one) commits him to so many radical and ridiculous positions that, even though I have defeated his argument, these moves he's forced to make to answer me are so wild that I couldn't pass up the opportunity to point them out. Here's four points Dan tries to make, along with some responses:
1. Dan's first point is to say that he's appealing to the perspicuity of Scripture. He then intimates that I have some problem with this doctrine, which I don't. However, putting aside the side issues he brings up, here's one ridiculous inference of his argument:
Dan claims that perspicuity applies to the essentials of saving faith. Okay, granted at some level---though it's expressed poorly and vaguely, I understand the general point Dan is struggling to make. But here's a problem: Why are there so many Calvinists and Arminians (or, universalists, &c)!? Though they all agree, at a general level, that we are saved by Christ alone, through faith alone, how this is worked out is very different among the various traditions.
But there's an even bigger problem, Dan says that, "The bible message, especially the essentials of the faith, is understandable by common men using their normal means of understanding terms." Okay, let's say I grant this, how does this translate to the idea that "all common men" will understand the term "choose", in the phrase "choose life", in a libertarian sense? Is Dan imposing a work on salvation? I can't be saved unless I believe that "choose" is to be meant libertarianly, just like I must believe that "Jesus" is to be meant as "the God-man who resurrected for our justification?" Or can I believe in the Mormon Jesus? If I must believe that "choose" commits me to libertarianism, then Dan implies that no Calvinists are saved! If Dan admits that Calvinists can be saved with a different understanding of "choose" than Dan has, but not a different understanding of Jesus, then he fails to make his point.
2. Dan finally tells us what he means by "common man." He writes: "For my purpose, 'common man' is in terms of a whole assembly. The bible was frequently addressed to all of Israel, all of the church.... and that for over a thousand years."
Besides the fact that using an Arminian understanding of "all", Dan thinks the infants in the OT assembly were libertarians(!), this now makes his argument even more ridiculous (miracles are possible!). There are, and have been, thousands of compatibilist "common men" on this understanding. Therefore, Dan's argument can't go through since some "common men" understand "choose" in non-libertarian terms. This is all the empirical evidence Dan needs to debunk his claim that "all common men" are libertarians! Dan knows that there are men in the church (i.e., the collection of common men) who are compatibilits, therefore Dan knows that not all common men are libertarians! So, now we have Dan's implicit admission that he's made empirically false claims, as well as my last post where I show that many respected dictionaries define "choose" in ways congenial to Calvinism. Dan is beating his own argument, I hardly have to do anything.
But it gets worse. Previously Dan wrote, "The Bible was written by and to the common man, not the semi-comnpatibilist." Okay, let's follow Dan's reasoning out: If the Bible was written to common men, and common men are just the members of the church, and common men are all libertarians, then no non-libertarian is a member of the church! Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Edwards, Helm, Hays, Manata, John Smith at the local OPC, are all outside of the church!
3. Dan offers a lengthy quote by Justin Martyr in which he thinks it refutes "fatalism." Three problems:
(i) If true, so what? Martyr isn't God.
(ii) Martyr doesn't talk about the relevant "fatalism" that is appealed to in the literature, i.e., accidental necessity, so his point is totally irrelevant.
(iii) It's not even clear how Martyr "refutes" fatalism and how it applies to Calvinism since I don't see anything of Calvinism being attacked by Martyr (and again, even if Martyr could be cleaned up and made more rigorous and precise by Dan, then see (i)).
4. Dan makes some throw-away comment about Stoics and determinism (ignoring the larger point which is that I argued that some "common men" have understood things deterministically, which undercuts his argument, he chose(!) not to respond to this point), I'd suggest he familiarize himself with the relevant literature, he can start here (and I never made a claim about "all", and I don't defend stoic determinism either, that's not the point).
It just keeps getting more and more weird and sad and embarrassing for Dan.
I am the Bread of Life
1.I was recently debating a Catholic on the correct interpretation of Jn 6. I stressed certain objections to the Eucharistic interpretation. One objection I accentuated was the fact that, in context, this interpretation is clearly anachronistic.
Now, my emphasis on this particular objection shouldn’t be taken to mean that’s the only major objection to the Eucharistic interpretation. But since Catholicism in general is guilty of foisting anachronistic interpretations on to Scripture, it’s worth devoting some time to this particular issue. And using Jn 6 is a good test-case. To clarify what’s wrong with anachronistic interpretations. That’s applicable to other Catholic prooftexts.
2.There are liberal commentators who admit that a Eucharistic reference in Jn 6 is anachronistic. But they don’t have a problem with that. From their viewpoint, this is a case in which the author of the Fourth Gospel, whom they don’t identify with the Apostle John, was historicizing a later doctrinal development. The author was backdating a later doctrinal development. On this view, the author began with a later doctrinal development, then invented a fictitious back-story to give it the illusion of dominical authorization. He made up a little story about the Eucharist, then put that on the lips of Jesus.
Since, on this view, the events in Jn 6 never happened, and since on this view, Jesus never spoke these words, there’s nothing wrong with a blatantly anachronistic reference to the Lord’s Supper–for Jn 6 isn’t a historical depiction in the first place.
The liberal interpretation at least as the virtue of being self-consistent–given its operation assumptions. And this is not a problem for Catholic commentators, since contemporary Catholic Bible scholars tend to be liberal. For them, Jn 6 is a record of the narrator’s theology, not a record of Jesus’ theology. The narrator is not a mouthpiece for Jesus; rather, Jesus is a mouthpiece for the narrator. From their standpoint, this is a speech spoken by no one to no one at no time and no place. Rather, it’s a fictitious speech, put in the mouth of a fictitious speaker, speaking to a fictitious audience, at a fictitious time and place.
But for Christians who think that Jn 6 describes a real world situation, we need to provide a realistic interpretation which matches the time, place, and audience.
3.Jason Engwer has raised another objection. In Jn 6, the Bread of Life discourse is preceded by the feeding of the 5000. That’s the lead in to the discourse. Indeed, at both a literary and chronological level, the prior event is a deliberate set up for what follows.
The feeding of the 5000 is a literal meal. Yet Jesus uses that event as a springboard to point out the spiritual inefficacy of physical consumption. And this is despite the fact that the feeding of the 5000 is no ordinary meal. It’s a miracle–just like the manna from heaven.
Jason then points out that Jesus is drawing a contrast between two different meals. But if both meals are literal, physical meals, then that destroys the intended contrast. What we have, instead, is a contrast between a literal meal and a figurative meal.
4.Finally, there are detailed exegetical objections to the Eucharistic interpretation by Johannine commentators like Craig Keener, D. A. Carson, and Herman Ridderbos.
Now, my emphasis on this particular objection shouldn’t be taken to mean that’s the only major objection to the Eucharistic interpretation. But since Catholicism in general is guilty of foisting anachronistic interpretations on to Scripture, it’s worth devoting some time to this particular issue. And using Jn 6 is a good test-case. To clarify what’s wrong with anachronistic interpretations. That’s applicable to other Catholic prooftexts.
2.There are liberal commentators who admit that a Eucharistic reference in Jn 6 is anachronistic. But they don’t have a problem with that. From their viewpoint, this is a case in which the author of the Fourth Gospel, whom they don’t identify with the Apostle John, was historicizing a later doctrinal development. The author was backdating a later doctrinal development. On this view, the author began with a later doctrinal development, then invented a fictitious back-story to give it the illusion of dominical authorization. He made up a little story about the Eucharist, then put that on the lips of Jesus.
Since, on this view, the events in Jn 6 never happened, and since on this view, Jesus never spoke these words, there’s nothing wrong with a blatantly anachronistic reference to the Lord’s Supper–for Jn 6 isn’t a historical depiction in the first place.
The liberal interpretation at least as the virtue of being self-consistent–given its operation assumptions. And this is not a problem for Catholic commentators, since contemporary Catholic Bible scholars tend to be liberal. For them, Jn 6 is a record of the narrator’s theology, not a record of Jesus’ theology. The narrator is not a mouthpiece for Jesus; rather, Jesus is a mouthpiece for the narrator. From their standpoint, this is a speech spoken by no one to no one at no time and no place. Rather, it’s a fictitious speech, put in the mouth of a fictitious speaker, speaking to a fictitious audience, at a fictitious time and place.
But for Christians who think that Jn 6 describes a real world situation, we need to provide a realistic interpretation which matches the time, place, and audience.
3.Jason Engwer has raised another objection. In Jn 6, the Bread of Life discourse is preceded by the feeding of the 5000. That’s the lead in to the discourse. Indeed, at both a literary and chronological level, the prior event is a deliberate set up for what follows.
The feeding of the 5000 is a literal meal. Yet Jesus uses that event as a springboard to point out the spiritual inefficacy of physical consumption. And this is despite the fact that the feeding of the 5000 is no ordinary meal. It’s a miracle–just like the manna from heaven.
Jason then points out that Jesus is drawing a contrast between two different meals. But if both meals are literal, physical meals, then that destroys the intended contrast. What we have, instead, is a contrast between a literal meal and a figurative meal.
4.Finally, there are detailed exegetical objections to the Eucharistic interpretation by Johannine commentators like Craig Keener, D. A. Carson, and Herman Ridderbos.
Mutant-X Arminians
One of the most telling signs of the fallacious nature of Calvinist apologetics in general is its heavy reliance upon caricatures and misrepresentation of the beliefs of other Christians. There are few things more frustrating than trying to explain a concept to someone who simply takes one aspect of what is being said, and runs with it in a half-baked attempt to disprove it, heedless of any details or qualifications, yet this very tactic is something of a staple among Calvinism’s more vocal proponents.
I’ve posted before on a proper Christian description of libertarian free will, as have numerous other writers. Of note is the fact that libertarian free will, in the context of orthodox Christian theology, allows one to freely choose within a range of available options. Therefore depending upon individual contexts, the possible choices may be limited, and some options may not be possible.
Nonetheless, no matter how often or how clearly it’s repeated, many Calvinist writers either aren’t grasping the concept, or just continue to dishonestly distort it. One of the usual tactics is to frame libertarian free will as some imaginary power that lets one do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, with no restraint whatsoever.
http://arminianperspectives.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-fallacies-of-calvinist-apologetics-–-fallacy-4-free-will-is-the-power-to-do-anything/
There are several problems with this contention:
1.There’s a potential discrepancy between what people say or think, and the logical consequences of what they say or think. This is not an issue of what Arminians say they believe. Rather, this is an issue of what their position logically commits them to.
2.Arminians believe in libertarian freedom, defined as the freedom to do otherwise (or choose otherwise).
But one problem with this belief is the total absence of any empirical evidence to substantiate their belief. For we only make one choice at a time.
Arminians think freedom of choice entails the freedom to choose between two or more options. But we have no experience in choosing each option. Therefore, we have no evidence that the options we didn’t choose were ever in play.
3.Since there’s no empirical evidence for their position, Arminians must fall back on intuition. They infer that if I can contemplate different hypothetical alternatives, and decide on one course of action rather than another, then this, of itself, is evidence of the freedom to do otherwise.
But there’s a problem with that inference. The inference would only be valid if there were a one-to-one correspondence between conceivable choices and actionable choices.
Yet many things are conceivable which are not realistic. I can imagine what it’s like to be Superman. But that’s not a live possibility–much to the chagrin of every five-year-old boy.
4.Then there’s a further problem. Arminians gloss the freedom to do otherwise in terms of alternate possibilities.
But if we have the freedom to choose between alternate possibilities, and realize one possibility or another, then what, if anything, would be the upper limit on that freedom?
What’s actual doesn’t circumscribe what’s possible, for the actual has reference to the past and the present. For Arminians, the past is unalterable, but the future is wide open. The future is the realm of possibilities.
The future imposes no limit on what we can do in the future, for the future is the result of our choices. We realize the future by our choices. There is no future apart from our choices. We create the future by the choices we make.
Therefore, the only restriction on the freedom to do otherwise would be what’s logically possible or logically compossible. There is no concrete restriction on our field of action.
We can’t do something that’s logically impossible or incompossible, but as long as we don’t choose a logically contradictory state of affairs, then we should be able to make anything happen. Wish it into being. There are no natural impediments to our field of action beyond logical coherence.
But, of course, real life doesn’t corroborate that claim.
5.To briefly take stock: there is no empirical evidence for Arminian freedom. And there is no intuitive evidence for Arminian freedom. The complete lack of evidence would, itself, be sufficient to deny Arminian freedom.
But beyond the lack of evidence there is also evidence to the contrary. So the Arminian presupposition suffers from both an absence of any positive evidence as well as positive counterevidence.
6.At best, the Arminian can only harmonize his position with the lack of evidence and contrary evidence by postulating that God imposes an arbitrary restriction on our freedom of opportunity. Our freedom of action is not constrained by any inherent lack of power on our part, but by God suppressing our latent abilities.
According to Arminian theology, a human being is like the Dark Phoenix, when left to its own devices. God must install a series of psychic circuit breakers to contain the Phoenix Force and thereby prevent the psionic powers of the Class-5 mutant from running amok.
I’ve posted before on a proper Christian description of libertarian free will, as have numerous other writers. Of note is the fact that libertarian free will, in the context of orthodox Christian theology, allows one to freely choose within a range of available options. Therefore depending upon individual contexts, the possible choices may be limited, and some options may not be possible.
Nonetheless, no matter how often or how clearly it’s repeated, many Calvinist writers either aren’t grasping the concept, or just continue to dishonestly distort it. One of the usual tactics is to frame libertarian free will as some imaginary power that lets one do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, with no restraint whatsoever.
http://arminianperspectives.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-fallacies-of-calvinist-apologetics-–-fallacy-4-free-will-is-the-power-to-do-anything/
There are several problems with this contention:
1.There’s a potential discrepancy between what people say or think, and the logical consequences of what they say or think. This is not an issue of what Arminians say they believe. Rather, this is an issue of what their position logically commits them to.
2.Arminians believe in libertarian freedom, defined as the freedom to do otherwise (or choose otherwise).
But one problem with this belief is the total absence of any empirical evidence to substantiate their belief. For we only make one choice at a time.
Arminians think freedom of choice entails the freedom to choose between two or more options. But we have no experience in choosing each option. Therefore, we have no evidence that the options we didn’t choose were ever in play.
3.Since there’s no empirical evidence for their position, Arminians must fall back on intuition. They infer that if I can contemplate different hypothetical alternatives, and decide on one course of action rather than another, then this, of itself, is evidence of the freedom to do otherwise.
But there’s a problem with that inference. The inference would only be valid if there were a one-to-one correspondence between conceivable choices and actionable choices.
Yet many things are conceivable which are not realistic. I can imagine what it’s like to be Superman. But that’s not a live possibility–much to the chagrin of every five-year-old boy.
4.Then there’s a further problem. Arminians gloss the freedom to do otherwise in terms of alternate possibilities.
But if we have the freedom to choose between alternate possibilities, and realize one possibility or another, then what, if anything, would be the upper limit on that freedom?
What’s actual doesn’t circumscribe what’s possible, for the actual has reference to the past and the present. For Arminians, the past is unalterable, but the future is wide open. The future is the realm of possibilities.
The future imposes no limit on what we can do in the future, for the future is the result of our choices. We realize the future by our choices. There is no future apart from our choices. We create the future by the choices we make.
Therefore, the only restriction on the freedom to do otherwise would be what’s logically possible or logically compossible. There is no concrete restriction on our field of action.
We can’t do something that’s logically impossible or incompossible, but as long as we don’t choose a logically contradictory state of affairs, then we should be able to make anything happen. Wish it into being. There are no natural impediments to our field of action beyond logical coherence.
But, of course, real life doesn’t corroborate that claim.
5.To briefly take stock: there is no empirical evidence for Arminian freedom. And there is no intuitive evidence for Arminian freedom. The complete lack of evidence would, itself, be sufficient to deny Arminian freedom.
But beyond the lack of evidence there is also evidence to the contrary. So the Arminian presupposition suffers from both an absence of any positive evidence as well as positive counterevidence.
6.At best, the Arminian can only harmonize his position with the lack of evidence and contrary evidence by postulating that God imposes an arbitrary restriction on our freedom of opportunity. Our freedom of action is not constrained by any inherent lack of power on our part, but by God suppressing our latent abilities.
According to Arminian theology, a human being is like the Dark Phoenix, when left to its own devices. God must install a series of psychic circuit breakers to contain the Phoenix Force and thereby prevent the psionic powers of the Class-5 mutant from running amok.
Appearances are deceptive
“It should also be noted how dependent Luther is here on the philosophical outlook of Ockhamism, despite all the protestations against scholasticism and philosophy. For Ockham there was no intelligible species in cognition as on the preceding epistemological models. On those models, the form or intelligible species of an object was actually grasped by the mind so that the mind took on or became the form or essence of an object. This incidentally was garnered from Aristotle who thought that the liquid in the eye was clear or translucent to take on all colors and so in a similar way the mind itself is formless. Knowledge was a two-place relation where the knower directly grasps the nature of the object even if there is a great difference in the sensible species or sensible qualities. Not all doors look alike, but they have the same form, which is communicated to and grasped by the mind. For Ockhamists though, there was no intelligible species and knowledge became a three place relation with the knower, the representation and the object. To make matters worse, the causal power of an object was insufficient to necessarily preserve the connection between the representation of itself and the object so that it was now possible that a representation or image could be caused to exist by something else other than that it was an image of. So an image of a palm tree could be produced in you without there being any palm tree present but instead caused in you by say God or the devil. An image then becomes causally diminished such that it can represent something totally opposed to it.”
http://energeticprocession.com/2009/07/03/hes-got-issues/
This description reminds me of transubstantiation. Indeed, it’s applicable to any version of the real presence.
Sacramental realists quote passages like “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” and “I am the bread” to prove the real presence.
One of the problems, though, is that if you take their prooftexts at face value, then their prooftexts prove too much. For it immediately generates a discrepancy between appearance and reality. There is the outward appearance of bread and wine, but the underlying reality of Christ’s body and blood. What you see is not what you get.
The doctrine of the real presence sets up a three-place relation between the communicant, the wafer, and the Host. The wafer is the representation. But there’s no intrinsic connection between the representation and the Host.
To the contrary, sacramental realism has to detach the secondary qualities of bread and wine from their primary qualities, detach the secondary qualities of a body and blood from their primary qualities, then attach the secondary qualities of bread and wine to the primary qualities of a body and blood.
Once you treat secondary qualities as detachable from primary qualities, then mix and match them, the underlying reality could be anything at all. It would be wholly undetectable. The secondary qualities would afford no indication of what you were actually encountering. Seems to me that any version of the real presence is subject to this consequence.
http://energeticprocession.com/2009/07/03/hes-got-issues/
This description reminds me of transubstantiation. Indeed, it’s applicable to any version of the real presence.
Sacramental realists quote passages like “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” and “I am the bread” to prove the real presence.
One of the problems, though, is that if you take their prooftexts at face value, then their prooftexts prove too much. For it immediately generates a discrepancy between appearance and reality. There is the outward appearance of bread and wine, but the underlying reality of Christ’s body and blood. What you see is not what you get.
The doctrine of the real presence sets up a three-place relation between the communicant, the wafer, and the Host. The wafer is the representation. But there’s no intrinsic connection between the representation and the Host.
To the contrary, sacramental realism has to detach the secondary qualities of bread and wine from their primary qualities, detach the secondary qualities of a body and blood from their primary qualities, then attach the secondary qualities of bread and wine to the primary qualities of a body and blood.
Once you treat secondary qualities as detachable from primary qualities, then mix and match them, the underlying reality could be anything at all. It would be wholly undetectable. The secondary qualities would afford no indication of what you were actually encountering. Seems to me that any version of the real presence is subject to this consequence.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
A Review Of Trusting The New Testament
I recently finished reading the second book in J.P. Holding's Tekton Building Blocks series, Trusting The New Testament (United States: Xulon Press, 2009). I highly recommend it.
The book is 300 pages long, and it covers four topics (oral tradition, New Testament textual transmission, New Testament authorship, and the New Testament canon) in thirty-six chapters. The foreword is written by Richard Howe of Southern Evangelical Seminary, and two chapters are written by Charles Jake IV (an attorney writing on the application of legal standards to the New Testament) and Jonathan Kendall (a lay Christian apologist writing on memorization of the Koran in Islam), but most of the book is written by Holding. There are chapters on the nature of oral tradition in antiquity, whether Jesus was illiterate, Bart Ehrman's view of the New Testament text, the Gospel Of Thomas, whether the Council of Nicaea determined the New Testament canon, and many other issues. There's a defense of the traditional authorship attributions of all of the books of the New Testament. Each of the New Testament documents is addressed only briefly, however, as you would expect in a book that's 300 pages long and covers so many other topics as well. He discusses more than twenty books not included in the canon, with the Gospel Of Thomas and the Gospel Of Judas each given a chapter of its own.
Those who have been active in apologetics for a long time should already be familiar with the general outlines of his argumentation. But he adds many significant details along the way, and he often interacts with books published within the last few years.
Here are a few passages from the book in which he addresses some of the inconsistencies of Christianity's critics, a theme he often addresses in this book and elsewhere:
I disagree with Holding on some points, such as his view of the authorship of Hebrews and some portions of his approach toward the New Testament canon. (For an explanation of my views on those subjects, see here.) He doesn't say much about hostile corroboration of the New Testament, such as affirmations of the traditional authorship attributions in non-Christian sources. His section on New Testament authorship is weighted too much toward answering objections and too little toward making a case for his own view. I agree with him that the sort of evidence he does discuss is more significant than critics suggest, but there's so much he doesn't include, sometimes leaving unmentioned some of the most significant evidence.
These are relatively minor disagreements, though. It's a very good book that covers many topics. And it's meant to address a general audience. The large majority of Christians would learn a lot from the book, and even those who are more knowledgeable on these subjects should find some valuable material they weren't familiar with.
The book is 300 pages long, and it covers four topics (oral tradition, New Testament textual transmission, New Testament authorship, and the New Testament canon) in thirty-six chapters. The foreword is written by Richard Howe of Southern Evangelical Seminary, and two chapters are written by Charles Jake IV (an attorney writing on the application of legal standards to the New Testament) and Jonathan Kendall (a lay Christian apologist writing on memorization of the Koran in Islam), but most of the book is written by Holding. There are chapters on the nature of oral tradition in antiquity, whether Jesus was illiterate, Bart Ehrman's view of the New Testament text, the Gospel Of Thomas, whether the Council of Nicaea determined the New Testament canon, and many other issues. There's a defense of the traditional authorship attributions of all of the books of the New Testament. Each of the New Testament documents is addressed only briefly, however, as you would expect in a book that's 300 pages long and covers so many other topics as well. He discusses more than twenty books not included in the canon, with the Gospel Of Thomas and the Gospel Of Judas each given a chapter of its own.
Those who have been active in apologetics for a long time should already be familiar with the general outlines of his argumentation. But he adds many significant details along the way, and he often interacts with books published within the last few years.
Here are a few passages from the book in which he addresses some of the inconsistencies of Christianity's critics, a theme he often addresses in this book and elsewhere:
Indeed, that despairing textual critics nevertheless proceed with their textual and historical work shows that they have their own presumption that we do know something; in particular, that someone like Bart Ehrman continues to use the New Testament as a source to argue for matters concerning the history of Christianity - as well as that he continues to use, without qualification, sources like Josephus and Tacitus with far, far less textual evidence - shows that "we don't know" is not the philosophy which critics employ in practice....
It is somewhere between 250 and 300 years before external testimony directly grants authorship of the Annals to Tacitus. We will see with further examples below that this is actually fairly quickly, as classical works go. But it needs to be said that this evidence is vanishingly small compared to the incredible number of attestations and attributions of NT documents by patristic writers, some few earlier than (but many as late as) those listed for Tacitus above....
Plato's later works show a broader range of vocabulary [than] his earlier ones [as New Testament documents attributed to the same author sometimes vary in their range of vocabulary], and Hamlet has more unique words than any other Shakespearian play - yet no one denies Shakespeare its authorship. (pp. 93-94, 141, n. 42 on p. 214)
I disagree with Holding on some points, such as his view of the authorship of Hebrews and some portions of his approach toward the New Testament canon. (For an explanation of my views on those subjects, see here.) He doesn't say much about hostile corroboration of the New Testament, such as affirmations of the traditional authorship attributions in non-Christian sources. His section on New Testament authorship is weighted too much toward answering objections and too little toward making a case for his own view. I agree with him that the sort of evidence he does discuss is more significant than critics suggest, but there's so much he doesn't include, sometimes leaving unmentioned some of the most significant evidence.
These are relatively minor disagreements, though. It's a very good book that covers many topics. And it's meant to address a general audience. The large majority of Christians would learn a lot from the book, and even those who are more knowledgeable on these subjects should find some valuable material they weren't familiar with.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Kaput
Dan has been furiously beating his wings, attempting to get out of the webs I've spun for him. The bad news for Dan is that things are only going to get worse.
So, here's some crucial Assumptions Dan's argument makes:
[A1] The "common man" is a libertarian and defines choice in libertarian fashion.
[A2] The dictionary is the repository of "common mans'" definition of choice, the dictionary defines "choice" assuming the rubric of libertarian metaphysics.
[A3] The Bible was written by and to the "common man".
[A4] For any word, x, that the Bible uses, the Bible means x however the "common man" understands that word at any time, t.
These crucial assumptions somehow are supposed to get to the Conclusion:
[C] The Bible uses the word choice, the "common man" understands choice under the rubric of libertarian metaphysics, and therefore the Bible asserts that libertarian metaphysics is the case when it uses the word "choice."
Now, in response I (as well as Steve Hays) have offered literally dozens of Objections to Dan's argument, not all of them have been dealt with. Here's a few:
[O1] We don't know what the referent of "common man" is supposed to be, and don't have necessary and sufficient conditions to demarcate "common man" from "uncommon man". Just what is a "common man".
[O2] There is empirical evidence which suggests that, especially considering Dan has offered absolutely zero empirical evidence of his own to support his assumption, the "common man" is not libertarian, head for head. The evidence I brought forth makes it, at the very least, far from obvious that all "common men" whoever are dyed-in-the-wool libertarians. Besides that, I pointed out that there have been many human societies that have been fatalists. So Dan's assumption about all "common men" whoever are just false, and obviously so.
[O3] Some (many?) "comon men" hold thatan indeterminate action is random or a lucky happening. So this is a massive problem for Dan, it makes his argument prove too much. Surely we aren't going to attribute some sort of sophisticated, technical, philosophical understanding of (one of the many forms of) "agent causation" to "common man."
[O4] It is demonstrably false the the Bible was written only by and to the "common man."
[O5] Dictionaries and "common men" can be wrong; therefore, Dan's argument could be used to support the errancy of Scripture.
[O6] It is possible that dictionaries and "common men" could take a "determinist turn", which means that freedom is at least compatible with determinism. Dan's argument allows for the compatibility since it allows for the possibility that the Bible could mean certain words in a sense compatible with determinism and choice.
[O7] There is a way that "alternative possibilities" could be read in compatibilist terms, e.g., hypothetically. Dan simply ignores this, forcing his square-peg argument through the round hole.
So far, these objections have gone unanswered.
Now, to be fair, Dan doesn't like the word "choice". Dan makes it clear that his argument depends on the word "choose" and not "choice." Dan writes,
In our debate, I argued that the dictionary definition of choose rules out determinism. In Paul's recent rejoinder he states: “I cited numerous dictionaries that didn’t include a PAP (Principle of Alternate Possibilities) element”. (link) This is true, but misleading. Paul defined choice, but not choose. My argument was based on the verb choose, not the noun choice. In this post I would like to revisit the dictionaries, and explain why it's important to distinguish between choice and choose.Using the word "choose" is important for Dan argument because:
...the 'dictionary definition' of choose includes at least two possibilities. But determinism prohibits twofold possibilities, so the dictionary rules out determinism.Dan has already admitted that I found definitions of choice which were compatible with determinism, that's why he won't use "choice" but only sticks with "choose." Therefore, if I offer definitions of "choose" which are neutral with respect to determinism, then Dan must admit, to be intellectually honest, that I have indeed fully, finally, and completely driven the last nail in the coffin that houses his (bad to begin with) argument against Calvinism. I will supply such definitions shortly.
Before I do, however, it is important to note that more than a couple dictionaries have, as part of their definition of "choose," this: "to make a choice" (cf. Merriam-Webster's Intermediate Dictionary, p.133; The Princeton Review Essential High School Dictionary. 91, etc.). Thus it seems clear to me that if "choosing" is "to make a choice", and if "to make a choice" is consistent with determinism, then choosing is so consistent.
But given Dan's refusal to admit that his argument was bad, especially when I cited numerous libertarian philosophers who opposed Dan's argument, the above point will not be enough. Neither will this next point, I suppose.
Dan has indicated on his blog that he has learned the most about LFW and how to defend it in its strongest theistic form (Molinism) from William Lane Craig. Now, Dan claims that it is essential to the definition of choice that we be able to choose alternative possibilities. Yet his guru states: "So long as a person's choice is causally undetermined, it is a free choice even if the person is unable to choose the opposite of that choice" (Craig, "The Middle-Knowledge View," in, Foreknowledge: Four Views, IVP, 130). So, even Craig disagrees with Dan.
But as I said, this won't be enough. Over all of the libertarian philosophers who specialize in the field Dan is incompetently dabbling in, Dan trusts the dictionary. So I will now fillet Dan's argument, leaving it dead once and for all.
Dan self-servingly cited some dictionaries that he thinks (remember, even the definitions he pushes can be read in a way that has been friendly to compatibilism) makes his case that "the dictionary" (there's no such thing) defines "choose" strictly in libertarian terms. When he finishes listing them, he confidentially asserts:
I could go on, but you get the point.Well, no, Dan, we don't "get the point." And not least of all because at least two of his definitions are compatible with "choosing" in a divinely-determined world. For example, Dan cited these two:
1. Merriam-Webster's defines choose as: to select freely and after consideration
2. Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: to decide what you want from a range of things or possibilities:
The first obviously does allow for compatibilism, unless Dan begs the question. The second does because it is in the form of a disjunction and not a conjunction, thus the "possibilities" is not required (again, this is to grant Dan his "possibilities" point).
But for some reason I think that Dan will not even be convinced by the fact that some of his own cherry-picked dictionaries allow for a "choosing" in a determined world. So let me quote a lot more. Because I like Dan and want to save him from the embarrassment that has become his argument, I went to the bookstore and rounded up a whole bunch of dictionaries. Before I give these definitions it is crucial to recall that when I defined "choice" in similar ways as we will see below, Dan granted their consistency with determinism, he must therefore grant that "choose" is likewise compatible. Before you read these, remember that absolutely crucial to Dan's argument is that all dictionaries, or all reputable ones (I guess), include the ability to actually instantiate an alternative possibility as essential (contrary to libertarian William Lane Craig, as well as most others, but let's noth let that bother us) to the (dictionary?) definition of choose. Keep that in mind.
Below I cite the entire definition (and any second or third or so on, definitions). I have left nothing out, and all sources are docummented.
choose v. (vt) 1. Pick out, select; take by preference. (vt) decide, think fit. (Collins Pocket Dictionary, New York: Harper Collins, 2007, 91)
choose v. 1. Select out of a greater number 2. select one or another 3. decide 4. select as. (The American Century Dictionary, New York: Warner Books, Oxford University Press, 1997, 102)
choose v. 1. Select out of a greater number of things, 2. decide, to prefer, to desire. (Oxford American Dictionary, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 147)
choose v. 1. to pick. (that was all, cited in, Spell it Right Dictionary, New York: Berlitz Publishing, 2007, 63)
choose v. 1. To pick out one or more from a greater number or group, 2. to make up one's mind; decide or prefer. (Webster's New World Basic Dictionary of American English, Cleveland: Wiley Publishing, 1988, 146)
choose v. 1. To pick out by preference; select 2. to decide or desire 3. to make a choice (The Princeton Review Essential High School Dictionary, New York: Random House, 2002, 91).
choose v. 1. To select freely after consideration 2. to make a choice 3. to see fit (Merriam-Webster's Intermediate Dictionary, Springfield Mass.: Merriam-Webster's Inc., 2004, 133)
choose v. 1. Decide which you are going to take from among a number of people or things. (Barron's Dictionary and Thesaurus, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 111).
choose v. 1. To select according to preference especially after consideration 2.a. to decide b. to prefer 3. to see fit 4. to make a choice (Merriam-Webster's School Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster's Inc., 2004, 165)
I could keep going, but I trust you get the point. ;-)
And with that, Dan must retract his argument. Not only have I shown that it is far from obvious that all "common men" whoever are libertarian (and bear in mind that Dan has done nothing to substantiate his crucial assumption about all "common men" whoever), I have just refuted the other major crucial assumption of Dan's argument, viz. that "the dictionary" has (actually) "possible" as an essential component to the definition of "choose," which is what makes it (according to him) affirm a libertarian metaphysic. I cited numerous well-respected dictionaries, gathered from the shelves of a "common man" bookstore, Barnes & Noble, that all define choice in a way fully compatible with determinism, as well as two definitions chosen by Dan (for a total of eleven respected dictionaries all coming down on my side of the argument). None of them included te word "possible," a curious fact considering that if Dan is right, these well-respected dictionaries all leave out the "essential" component of "choose"! What hubris.
Not only that, a few of these definitions are so similar to Robert Kane's definitions that this has the effect of refuting another one of Dan's many unargued assumptions: Kane is offering a "technical, philosophical definition" of choice/choose. To see that, let's recall Kane's definition:
Robert Kane: “A choice is the formation of an intention or purpose to do something. It resolves uncertainty and indecision in the mind about what to do” (Robert Kane, “Libertarian Perspectives on Free Agency and Free Will.” Oxford Handbook of Free Will, p.423).
So, not only has Dan's argument been previously refuted by both Hays and I, I have now refuted Dan's argument solely from premises Dan accepts, and has admitted show that dictionary definitions of "choice" are consistent with determinism. On pain of irrationality, and general avoidance of pig-headedness, Dan the Arminian has been compelled to admit that I have defeated his argument.
QED
The human virus
Radical environmentalism is becoming mainstream. For example, I notice that the Animal Planet channel is busy glamorizing an ecoterrorist organization (“Whale Wars”).
Radical environmentalism has found powerful allies in the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress. Radical environmentalism also uses front organizations like the EU and UN to get its policies enacted through force of international law. Global warming is the current Trojan horse in the successful effort to domestic radical environmentalism.
In view of the inroads which this movement is making, we should be on the alert for what the worldview of radical environmentalism amounts to when carried to its logical extreme. Here is one lucid statement of its means and ends:
http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/editorial-070504-1.html
Radical environmentalism has found powerful allies in the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress. Radical environmentalism also uses front organizations like the EU and UN to get its policies enacted through force of international law. Global warming is the current Trojan horse in the successful effort to domestic radical environmentalism.
In view of the inroads which this movement is making, we should be on the alert for what the worldview of radical environmentalism amounts to when carried to its logical extreme. Here is one lucid statement of its means and ends:
But the reality is that what is happening now is the result of the collective actions of us hominids. We are the ruthlessly territorial primates whose numbers have soared far beyond the level of global carrying capacity for the deadly behavioural characteristics that we display.
Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste. Biological diversity is being threatened by over-exploitation, toxic pollution, agricultural mono-culture, invasive species, competition, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, oceanic acidification, ozone depletion, global warming, and climate change. It's a runaway train of ecological calamities.
It's a train that carries all the earth's species as unwilling passengers with humans as the manically insane engineers unwilling to use the brake pedal.
The trends are all around us and in the process of rapid escalation. Of course, it is easy to dismiss this and go about our business which is the ignorance-is-bliss-school of thought.
But, would we do this if we were diagnosed with a terminal disease? No, as depressing as that revelation would be, we would address possible remedies. We would look for a cure. We would try to survive.
The planet's ecosystem is a collective living organism and operates very much like the human body. Water is the blood of the earth. It provides the same function in the body as it does for the earth. Water transports nutrients to the land and transports waste to the sea or more specifically the estuaries and salt marshes that function as the liver for the earth, cleansing the water of the toxins. Water circulates through the ecosystem from the sea into the clouds falling back onto the land and returning to the sea again. It is pumped by the energy of the sun, the heart of the earth. It's a continuous cyclic movement of nutrient bearing, waste removing action that keeps the land fertile.
A river is an artery and a vein, and streams and brooks are capillaries. Put a dam on a river and you cut off an artery preventing nutrients from moving downstream and you cut off the vein preventing the waste from the land from being removed and cleansed.
Plankton, plants, and especially forests are the lungs of the earth, removing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Overfishing, plankton harvesting, and deforestation is literally diminishing global lung capacity.
Species work interdependently to develop mutually beneficial strategies that maintain and strengthen ecosystems. Every species removed diminishes the system and weakens the collective body of the biosphere.
Humans are presently acting upon this body in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system. A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet's life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth.
I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the "AIDS of the Earth." I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves. We are both the pathogen and the vector. But we also have the capability of being the anti-virus if only we can recognize the symptoms and address the disease with effective measures of control.
I remember walking along the beaches in Vancouver harbour a few decades ago. Every single stone overturned sent a flurry of disturbed baby crabs scurrying to find new cover. I was fascinated by the sheer number of tiny crustaceans that I observed on those walks. Today, I have not found a single young crab under a single rock on those beaches. They were picked clean by Vietnamese immigrants that descended like locusts onto those beaches and stripped them clean. And criticism of that exploitation immediately elicited accusations of racism.
Today racism, cultural rights, and the right to exploit nature for commercial gain are the weapons used to defend gross over-exploitation of species and the destruction of natural habitats.
There is only one cure, only one way of stopping this rising epidemic of extinctions. The solution requires an extraordinarily immense effort by all of human society but it is achievable.
We need to re-wild the planet. We need to "get ourselves back to the garden" as Joni Mitchell once so poetically framed it.
This is a process that will require a complete overhaul of all of humanities economic, cultural, and life style systems. Within the context of our present anthropocentric mind-set the solution is impossible. It will require a complete transformation of all human realities.
We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.
In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.
We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe.
We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels.
Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.
All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.
Preferably vegan and vegetarian diets can be adopted. We need to eliminate herds of ungulates like cows and sheep and replace them with wild ungulates like bison and caribou and allow those species to fulfill the proper roles in nature. We need to restore the prey predator relationship and bring back the wolf and the bear. We need the large predators and ungulates, not as food, but as custodians of the land that absorbs the carbon dioxide and produces the oxygen. We need to live with them in mutual respect.
We need to remove and destroy all fences and barriers that bar wildlife from moving freely across the land. We need to lower populations of domestic housecats and dogs. Already the world's housecats consume more fish than all the world's seals and we have made the cow into the largest aquatic predator on the planet because more than one half of all fish taken from the sea is converted into meal for animal feed.
We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.
We need an economic system that provides all people with educational, medical, security, and support systems without mass production and vast utilization of resources. This will only work within the context of a much smaller global population.
Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.
This approach to parenting is radical but it is preferable to a system where everyone is expected to have children in order to keep the population of consumers up to keep the wheels of production moving. An economic and political system dependent on continuous growth cannot survive the ecological law of finite resources.
Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.
http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/editorial-070504-1.html
Meat is murder
The liberal media blamed prolife organizations for the assassination of George Tiller. This accusation takes various forms. Even though mainstream prolife organizations preach nonviolence, their “incendiary” rhetoric is said to incite acts of violence against abortion “providers.”
Likewise, we’re told the prolife position, if taken to its logical extreme, leads to violence against abortion “providers.”
I’ve already addressed the “logical” argument. Now I’d like to approach the argument from a different angle.
There’s a parallel phenomenon on the left. That involves ecoterrorism, viz. Earth First, Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Army, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, &c. These groups use incendiary rhetoric. Moreover, they resort to forms of ecotage like arson, car bombing, and tree spiking. They consider this to be a logical extension of the conservation ethic.
However, their guerilla tactics are denounced by mainstream environmental organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Society.
If the liberal media were consistent, it would draw the same linkage between ecoterrorism and the environmental movement which it hypes in relation to “Christian terrorism” and the prolife movement.
We could also draw a parallel with the anti-globalization movement.
Likewise, we’re told the prolife position, if taken to its logical extreme, leads to violence against abortion “providers.”
I’ve already addressed the “logical” argument. Now I’d like to approach the argument from a different angle.
There’s a parallel phenomenon on the left. That involves ecoterrorism, viz. Earth First, Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Army, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, &c. These groups use incendiary rhetoric. Moreover, they resort to forms of ecotage like arson, car bombing, and tree spiking. They consider this to be a logical extension of the conservation ethic.
However, their guerilla tactics are denounced by mainstream environmental organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Society.
If the liberal media were consistent, it would draw the same linkage between ecoterrorism and the environmental movement which it hypes in relation to “Christian terrorism” and the prolife movement.
We could also draw a parallel with the anti-globalization movement.
Friday, July 03, 2009
The noseeum assumption
Because I’ve frequently presented a supralapsarian theodicy, I haven’t bothered with some other responses to the problem of evil. I’ve neglected other arguments because I find them unnecessary–which is not to say other arguments can’t be good arguments in their own right.
I’d add that a supralapsarian theodicy furnishes a general rationale for the existence of evil. It doesn’t presume to explain why God decrees any specific evil. And, in that respect, the argument I’m going to examine may have some supplementary value.
(BTW, I believe that Paul Manata has blogged on this issue as well.)
There are Christian philosophers who, in response to the evidential problem of evil, question a key premise. They take the position that if God exists, there’s no presumption that we would know his reasons for permitting evil. Therefore, they don’t think it’s incumbent upon a Christian to even give a reason for the occurrence of evil.
Of course, from the standpoint of an atheist, this smacks of special pleading. What are we to say to that reaction?
1.If you begin with the ground level assumption that there’s no evidence for God’s existence, then it’s more natural to view the response of these philosophers as special pleading. It’s like Flew’s famous parable of the invisible gardener. You have no initial evidence for God’s existence. Then, in the face of prima facie evidence against his existence, you add insult to injury by saying you also don’t need to give a reason for the occurrence of evil. You don’t need to give a reason for God’s existence and, what is more, you don’t need to give a reason for the existence of evil. So nothing could possibly count against your belief in God. Not the absence of evidence or the evidence to the contrary. One could justify any belief, however arbitrary or outlandish, on this basis.
2.This objection might have some force against a Christian fideist. Of course, as a fideist, he’d also be immune to that objection. But from an outsider’s perspective, it would carry some force.
However, except for fideists, most Christian philosophers, theologians, and apologists don’t begin with the ground level assumption that there’s no evidence for God. To the contrary, they think there are various lines of evidence for God’s existence.
Hence, there’s an obvious difference between saying:
i) We don’t have to give a reason for the existence of God, and–what is more–we don’t have to give a reason for the existence of evil!
And saying:
ii) We don’t have a reason for the existence of evil, but we have many reasons for the existence of God–some of which we can give you, and some of which we can’t (since they involve personal experience, which is intransitive).
(i) invites the charge of special pleading in a way that (ii) does not.
And this, in turn, goes to the incommensurable perspective of the believer and the unbeliever. From the unbeliever’s viewpoint, belief in God is like belief in the invisible gardener. The problem of evil is just a special case of that larger deficiency. An aggravating factor. One more thing the theist can’t account for.
Since, however, the average Christian philosopher, theologian, or apologist doesn’t share that perspective, the two sides don’t place the burden of proof in the same position. For they don’t share the same starting point.
3.Beyond the question of special pleading, is it possible or plausible that God could have reasons for allowing (or decreeing) evil which are inscrutable to the human observer? Seems to me that that’s eminently plausible.
Take those science fiction scenarios in which a time-traveler wants to improve the future. He wants to change the past to avert some future tragedy. But every time he tries, he discovers that by averting one tragedy, he precipitates another tragedy in its stead. Although, when he begins tinkering with the future, he’s sure that our world is not the best possible world, that he can create a better world, he finds out that it’s exceedingly difficult to create an alternate timeline in which the overall balance of good and evil is superior. On the one hand, a past evil might give rise to a future good. On the other hand, a past good might give rise to a future evil. He can eliminate one particular evil, but in so doing he either eliminates a resultant good or precipitates another evil which is just as bad or even worse.
Clearly no human being knows enough to juggle all of the alternate outcomes and say which aggregate outcome represents a better balance overall. Actual historical causation is fiendishly complex, and when you add hypothetical variables to the mix, the various permutations are hopelessly complicated. Who’s to say which combination is better or worse? Certainly no finite mind can perform that operation.
4.On a related note, it is plausible that God has a reason not to tell us his reason? Once again, that strikes me as eminently plausible.
Let’s go back to our science fiction scenario regarding the time-traveler. In order for God to tell us why he allows (or decrees) every specific evil occurrence, he’d have to reveal the future in minute detail. Reveal the future to show how past evils give rise to future goods. How the good outweighs the evil.
But, of course, science fiction scenarios involving time travel also explore the logical difficulties of knowing the future. A future you can know is a future you can change. For the future you know is a future which, by foreknowing it, you’re in a position to change. And that, in turn, introduces a counter-suggestive dynamic which undermines foreknowledge.
The reason we can’t change the future is because we don’t know the future. So we don’t know what to do in the present (or the past, under time travel scenarios) which would change the future.
If, however, you know the future, then you know what to change in the past to change in the future. But if, in fact, you act on that knowledge, you undermine the basis of that foreknowledge. That leads us to the intractable paradoxes of time travel.
Hence, there’s a plausible reason why God would refrain from revealing his detailed reasons for allowing (or decreeing) any particular evil. That action would require God to give us a blueprint of the future. But that generates two problems:
i) It would tempt us to tinker with the future. You and I as individuals don’t care about the overall good. We care about our loved ones. Our emotional priorities lie with the welfare of our loved ones. Left to our own devices, we’d lower the wellbeing of the many to raise the wellbeing of the few. To improve the situation of my loved ones at the expense of your loved ones.
ii) And, of course, you can’t change the future unless you know the future. But if you change the future you can’t know the future.
Therefore, God not only has a plausible reason, but a necessary reason, to keep his reasons to himself.
(God can know the future because God has no intention of changing the future. Indeed, he knows the future because he intends the future.)
5.I’d add that (3) & (4) aren’t special pleading. Most science fiction writers are unbelievers. Most science fictions writers who write about time travel are unbelievers. Therefore, when I use this scenario to illustrate a Christian theodicy, I’m drawing on assumptions which even unbelievers acknowledge. Therefore, it’s not special pleading for a Christian to make assumptions which he shares in common with the unbeliever.
I’d add that a supralapsarian theodicy furnishes a general rationale for the existence of evil. It doesn’t presume to explain why God decrees any specific evil. And, in that respect, the argument I’m going to examine may have some supplementary value.
(BTW, I believe that Paul Manata has blogged on this issue as well.)
There are Christian philosophers who, in response to the evidential problem of evil, question a key premise. They take the position that if God exists, there’s no presumption that we would know his reasons for permitting evil. Therefore, they don’t think it’s incumbent upon a Christian to even give a reason for the occurrence of evil.
Of course, from the standpoint of an atheist, this smacks of special pleading. What are we to say to that reaction?
1.If you begin with the ground level assumption that there’s no evidence for God’s existence, then it’s more natural to view the response of these philosophers as special pleading. It’s like Flew’s famous parable of the invisible gardener. You have no initial evidence for God’s existence. Then, in the face of prima facie evidence against his existence, you add insult to injury by saying you also don’t need to give a reason for the occurrence of evil. You don’t need to give a reason for God’s existence and, what is more, you don’t need to give a reason for the existence of evil. So nothing could possibly count against your belief in God. Not the absence of evidence or the evidence to the contrary. One could justify any belief, however arbitrary or outlandish, on this basis.
2.This objection might have some force against a Christian fideist. Of course, as a fideist, he’d also be immune to that objection. But from an outsider’s perspective, it would carry some force.
However, except for fideists, most Christian philosophers, theologians, and apologists don’t begin with the ground level assumption that there’s no evidence for God. To the contrary, they think there are various lines of evidence for God’s existence.
Hence, there’s an obvious difference between saying:
i) We don’t have to give a reason for the existence of God, and–what is more–we don’t have to give a reason for the existence of evil!
And saying:
ii) We don’t have a reason for the existence of evil, but we have many reasons for the existence of God–some of which we can give you, and some of which we can’t (since they involve personal experience, which is intransitive).
(i) invites the charge of special pleading in a way that (ii) does not.
And this, in turn, goes to the incommensurable perspective of the believer and the unbeliever. From the unbeliever’s viewpoint, belief in God is like belief in the invisible gardener. The problem of evil is just a special case of that larger deficiency. An aggravating factor. One more thing the theist can’t account for.
Since, however, the average Christian philosopher, theologian, or apologist doesn’t share that perspective, the two sides don’t place the burden of proof in the same position. For they don’t share the same starting point.
3.Beyond the question of special pleading, is it possible or plausible that God could have reasons for allowing (or decreeing) evil which are inscrutable to the human observer? Seems to me that that’s eminently plausible.
Take those science fiction scenarios in which a time-traveler wants to improve the future. He wants to change the past to avert some future tragedy. But every time he tries, he discovers that by averting one tragedy, he precipitates another tragedy in its stead. Although, when he begins tinkering with the future, he’s sure that our world is not the best possible world, that he can create a better world, he finds out that it’s exceedingly difficult to create an alternate timeline in which the overall balance of good and evil is superior. On the one hand, a past evil might give rise to a future good. On the other hand, a past good might give rise to a future evil. He can eliminate one particular evil, but in so doing he either eliminates a resultant good or precipitates another evil which is just as bad or even worse.
Clearly no human being knows enough to juggle all of the alternate outcomes and say which aggregate outcome represents a better balance overall. Actual historical causation is fiendishly complex, and when you add hypothetical variables to the mix, the various permutations are hopelessly complicated. Who’s to say which combination is better or worse? Certainly no finite mind can perform that operation.
4.On a related note, it is plausible that God has a reason not to tell us his reason? Once again, that strikes me as eminently plausible.
Let’s go back to our science fiction scenario regarding the time-traveler. In order for God to tell us why he allows (or decrees) every specific evil occurrence, he’d have to reveal the future in minute detail. Reveal the future to show how past evils give rise to future goods. How the good outweighs the evil.
But, of course, science fiction scenarios involving time travel also explore the logical difficulties of knowing the future. A future you can know is a future you can change. For the future you know is a future which, by foreknowing it, you’re in a position to change. And that, in turn, introduces a counter-suggestive dynamic which undermines foreknowledge.
The reason we can’t change the future is because we don’t know the future. So we don’t know what to do in the present (or the past, under time travel scenarios) which would change the future.
If, however, you know the future, then you know what to change in the past to change in the future. But if, in fact, you act on that knowledge, you undermine the basis of that foreknowledge. That leads us to the intractable paradoxes of time travel.
Hence, there’s a plausible reason why God would refrain from revealing his detailed reasons for allowing (or decreeing) any particular evil. That action would require God to give us a blueprint of the future. But that generates two problems:
i) It would tempt us to tinker with the future. You and I as individuals don’t care about the overall good. We care about our loved ones. Our emotional priorities lie with the welfare of our loved ones. Left to our own devices, we’d lower the wellbeing of the many to raise the wellbeing of the few. To improve the situation of my loved ones at the expense of your loved ones.
ii) And, of course, you can’t change the future unless you know the future. But if you change the future you can’t know the future.
Therefore, God not only has a plausible reason, but a necessary reason, to keep his reasons to himself.
(God can know the future because God has no intention of changing the future. Indeed, he knows the future because he intends the future.)
5.I’d add that (3) & (4) aren’t special pleading. Most science fiction writers are unbelievers. Most science fictions writers who write about time travel are unbelievers. Therefore, when I use this scenario to illustrate a Christian theodicy, I’m drawing on assumptions which even unbelievers acknowledge. Therefore, it’s not special pleading for a Christian to make assumptions which he shares in common with the unbeliever.
The bread of life
I'm reproducing some comments I posted over at Beggars All:
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“Thus, the argument between Messrs. Bellisario and Fan about whether the proof texts at John 6 or 1 Cor. 11 are to be understood as reality vs. metaphor is wrong-headed from the start. Catholic doctrine requires that the words in these passages about the bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, are to be understood as both.”
In other words, Catholic dogma predetermines how the Scriptures are to be understood. Scripture doesn’t determine Catholic dogma.
“It should be noted that those scriptural passages comparing Jesus to a door or to a vine do not help the Protestant case here because in those scripture passages, Our Lord is not talking about the institution of a sacrament.”
Of course, the Lord’s Supper hadn’t been instituted at the time Jesus was addressing his Jewish audience in Jn 6. therefore, Hoffer’s observation undercuts his Eucharistic interpretation.
“First, Mr. Fan fails to take into account the disciplina arcani that the early Church practiced in connection with mysteries of the Eucharist.”
i) I’m sure that TF is aware of that.
ii) More to the point, appeal to a disciplina arcani was a standard tactic of heretical esoteric cults. That’s a foundation of the hermetic tradition.
6:44 PM, June 28, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“I respond: Nope. You put the horse before the cart.”
Nope. I simply responded to you in terms of how you chose to word your original statement. If anyone is putting the horse before the cart, that would be you.
“The teachings of the apostles passed down through their successors, the bishops and early Church fathers as to how the Scriptures were in fact understood predetermined Catholic dogma.”
i) That’s a nice illustration of assuming what you need to prove.
ii) Moreover, if word-of-mouth was the mode of transmission intended by God, then the NT is superfluous. Who needs Scripture if oral tradition will suffice?
“Regardless, the establishment of Catholic dogmas is not the arbitrary exercise as your statement seems to imply.”
What you’ve offered is an arbitrary assertion in lieu of an argument.
“Did someone come before you and predetermine what the doctrines or dogmatic expressions members were to hold or did someone hand you a bible and said ‘go figure everything out for yourself?’ I do not see why the notion of a Church having defined dogma presents a problem for anyone.”
That comparison suffers from a fatal fallacy of equivocation. In Reformed theological method, doctrine is supposed to be the result of exegesis, not tradition.
“As far as disciplina arcani goes, Origen, St. Basil, St Augustine and others documented this practice of the early Church.”
i) To my knowledge, appeal to a disciplina arcani to explain away the silence of the church fathers on later Catholic dogmas goes back to the 17C Catholic apologist Emmanuel Schelstrate.
ii) His argument was rendered obsolete by Newman’s theory of development. So your appeal is badly out of date.
iii) And you’re also ducking the issue of how such an appeal can equally be used by heretical esoteric cults (e.g. Gospel of Thomas 92).
“I was merely reporting on a historical fact in regards to the Eucharist, not commenting on whether the practice is laudatory in all instances.”
No, what you’re doing is to dodge the implications of an argument that you yourself introduced. You said:
“It should be noted that those scriptural passages comparing Jesus to a door or to a vine do not help the Protestant case here because in those scripture passages, Our Lord is not talking about the institution of a sacrament.”
To which I responded:
“Of course, the Lord’s Supper hadn’t been instituted at the time Jesus was addressing his Jewish audience in Jn 6. therefore, Hoffer’s observation undercuts his Eucharistic interpretation.”
I’m still waiting for your counterargument. Evidently, you have none to offer.
“But then again, Mt. 7:6 does state that we are not give what is holy to the dogs or throw pearls to swine. So it would seem that Our Lord did not necessarily have a problem with the practice.”
You need to demonstrate, through actual exegesis, that this has any reference to withholding information about the Mass from outsiders.
10:11 AM, June 29, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“I do not see how. As a TA, do you give instructions before you ask your students to do something or afterwards? What Jesus said was no different.”
That illustration ignores the actual context of Jn 6. Jesus his faulting his listeners for their refusal to credit his claims. This assumes that at the time he spoke, they were in a position to grasp what he said. If, however, this is a cryptic allusion to the future institution of the Mass, then they’d be in no position to know what he’s talking about since, on that interpretation, the Mass had yet to be instituted–and there’s no precursor to that institution.
So a correct interpretation of Jn 6 depends on background knowledge which was already available to the audience Jesus was addressing.
“Another way of looking at it~Jesus's words here indicate that was a promise of what was to come, hence Jesus uses words like ‘if,’ ‘he that’, and ‘shall’, all of which indicate something that will occur after satisfaction of a precondition.”
You’re now assuming, without benefit of argument, that the future referent is the Mass. In context, however, Jn 6 foreshadows Jn 19. And based on the Jesus’ evident fulfillment of OT motifs which they already had at their disposal (i.e. his miracles, OT scriptures) when he spoke, they were in a position to discern the prefigurement of his redemptive death.
The Fourth Gospel deliberately omits any account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper–in comparison to Luke. Rather, we have a steady build up to the climactic events of chap. 19.
“My reply: Of course your argument suffers because you commit the genetic fallacy of assuming that the ‘Reformed theological method,’ whatever that purports to be and assuming that you can get every Reformed Protestant to agree on the definition, is the correct method to be used in exegesis without offering any proof that it IS the correct method to be used in exegesis. The novelty of your methodology over the older Catholic use of Tradition to aid in understanding Scriptures is not proof that your methodology is somehow better. Perhaps you can point me to the bible passage that states that we are all bound to use the ‘reformed theological method’ to understand the Scriptures. I didn't find that phrase in My Strong's concordance.”
I see that you have problems following your own argument. You attempted to mount an argument from analogy–from the fact that both your church and Reformed churches have creeds. If, however, your parallel breaks down at a critical point of comparison, then the argument from analogy is invalidated by a fatal equivocation of terms.
It’s irrelevant whether or not you agree with Reformed theological method. That’s not the point. The point is whether your argument from analogy is valid as an argument from analogy. If it’s disanalogous where it needs to be analogous, then it fails as an argument from analogy.
3:41 PM, June 29, 2009
steve said...
“[Hoffer] If that is what the Holy Spirit is saying to you in this passage, so be it, but it seems to be a rather restrictive reading of this passage particularly in light of Jn. 6:51. But what do I know?”
i) I didn’t invoke the Holy Spirit to justify my interpretation.
ii) My interpretation is perfectly consistent with Jn 6:51–where the heavenly bread is a metaphor for Jesus’ Incarnation and immolation.
iii) BTW, do you think every communicant is heavenbound? Is every Catholic who ever took communion either in heaven or heavenbound? That’s what Jn 6:51 entails-if you construe it eucharistically.
“I am sure you know better too than those fellers Jesus met on the road to Emmaus after He rose from the dead. Obviously, they were mistaken that there was anything special about Jesus taking bread and blessing it, then breaking it and giving it to them. [Lk. 24:28-35].”
i) Are you using Lk 24 to interpret Jn 6? Why think that’s relevant?
ii) You’re also equivocating. What makes the incident in Lk 24 special? The bread? Or Jesus?
In Lk 24, there would be nothing special about the breaking of bread apart from the Jesus standing before them, breaking the break, and distributing the bread.
That’s quite different from transubstantiation, with Jesus invisibly concealed under the species of bread and wine. If the Mass were actually like Lk 24, it would be a very different event!
“Oh, when you write ‘the Mass had yet to be instituted–and there’s no precursor to that institution’ does this mean that I have to disregard all that bread and wine offering nonsense by Melchezidek, and all that sacrifice stuff at Lev. 23 and 24?”
You’re committing a basic level confusion:
i) OT types don’t prefigure NT sacraments like communion. Rather, they prefigure events in the life of Christ, like his redemptive death.
ii) Put another way, they symbolize the same thing the sacraments symbolize. They don’t symbolize sacraments; rather, they symbolize what sacraments like communion stand for: the underlying historic event. It’s not a symbol of another symbol. Rather, both are symbols of a common event.
“And have you ever attended a synagogue service, like the first Christians did? I have and they sure seem to be a lot of similarities with the Catholic Mass. Those Jewish folks even have a lot of the same prayers.”
i) Does that include the 18th Benediction?
ii) I also notice that you’re not attempting to exegete Jn 6. Instead, you’re resorting to anachronistic comparisons with modern synagogues.
“And read from the some of the same books of the Bible that we do.”
Of course, the canon of the Hebrew Bible is not the same as the Catholic OT canon. Thanks for reminding us of the discontinuities between Judaism and Catholicism–which nicely undercuts your argument.
“Did they copy all that stuff from us or do you think that Jewish forms of worship may have had an influence on the formulation of Christian liturgies?”
i) Given the amount of anti-Semitism in traditional Roman Catholicism, that’s a good question.
ii) Moreover, you can’t prove very much from religious rites since there can be a lot of similarity in practice even though the underlying theology is quite different. There’s a lot of similarity in the way Baptists and Lutherans celebrate communion. But they don’t have the same theological understanding of the rite.
12:46 PM, June 30, 2009
steve said...
“[Hoffer] Does the correct interpretation of Jn. 6 depend on background knowledge which was already available to the audience Jesus was addressing? This Chapter suggests that Jesus addressed more than one audience, but for argument’s sake I will bite…”
i) For the speech to be comprehensible to the listeners, it can’t very well assume knowledge which is inaccessible to the listener.
ii) There may be a shift from the scene of the miracle to the adjacent synagogue where the subsequent debate took place, but we’re still dealing with a Jewish audience before the institution of the Lord’s Supper.
“What background knowledge did the audience Jesus address have?”
I already said: knowledge of the OT, as well as Jesus’ fulfillment, up to that point, of OT types and prophecies.
“The way I read the passage is that Jesus’ audiences understood Jesus only too well what He was talking about and despite the signs He showed them only the previous day, most of the audiences, Jesus’ disciples and followers included, still could not accept His teaching. ”
And if, according to you, Jn 6 was actually referring to the future institution of the Mass, then they’d be in no position to know what he’s talking about. To the extent that they understood him well enough to resist what he was saying, that undercuts your argument.
“And what do you think goes on at the Mass? We play bingo? The Mass is one the primary methods used by Jesus’ followers to pass along what they discerned to subsequent generations in the Church.”
As usual, you have a knack for missing the point. There’s an obvious difference between general knowledge of a certain kind of event, and specific knowledge of a particular event.
On the basis of Jesus’ fulfillment of OT types and prophecies, they were in a position to know that he would die a sacrificial death. That involves general knowledge of a certain kind of event.
They would be in no position to know about the institution of the Lord’s Supper–which involves specific knowledge of a particular event.
“Considering that St. John the Evangelist wrote his Gospel decades after St. Paul wrote 1 Cor. that so clearly describes Christians celebrating the Lord’s Supper, do you think he had a need to do so as well? Or is it possible that John wrote his Gospel to illustrate some other points that God wanted him to write about?”
Once again, that undercuts your own argument. You have self-defeating habit–which simplifies my task.
If John wrote his Gospel to illustrate some “other” points–points other than the Lord’s Supper-then by your own logic you can’t very well assume that Jn 6 is illustrating the Lord’s Supper.
“Now you have claimed (without proving so) that your denomination uses a different methodology of formulating dogma and as a result my argument is somehow invalidated by that .”
Of course it uses a different methodology. You yourself, as a Catholic, think that Catholic theological method different from Protestant theological method. Hence the debates over sola Scriptura, &c.
“I am trying to understand the basis for your conclusory assertions that somehow the Reformed theological method, whatever that purports to be, is substantively different or better than the typological, allegorical and other methods used by the Early Church Fathers and the Catholic Church.”
i) No, your argument was an argument from analogy. That’s a different issue than which theological method is better.
ii) As to which exegetical methods are used by the Catholic church, your information here–as elsewhere–is badly out of date. Catholic Bible scholars have adopted Protestant hermeneutical methods. And they do so with the sanction of the modern Magisterium. Try reading Joseph Fitzmyer’s The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method.
You need to wake up and take a look under the hood of your own denomination.
12:47 PM, June 30, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“The first rule of reading the Scriptures is to do so prayerfully.”
No, the first rule of reading the Scriptures is to respect original intent.
Professing believers from different theological traditions can all read the Scriptures prayerfully, and arrive at mutually exclusive interpretations. So that’s hardly the first rule of reading the Scriptures.
“My interpretation of Jn 6:51 is consistent too if one understands that Christ is talking sacramentally here. My understanding necessarily incorporates your interpretation and adds to it.”
No, it doesn’t add to it, any more than you can add a square to a circle. You can’t add a literal interpretation to a figurative interpretation.
“My reply: Scripture has to be understood in the context of all of Scripture. In light of the admonition at 1 Cor. 11:27, the answer to both questions here is no.”
On the one hand you interpret Jn 6:51 Eucharistically. On the other hand, when a Eucharistic interpretation of the wording would entail the salvation of every single communicant, you disregard the actual wording of Jn 6:51 and arbitrarily restrict its scope by an extraneous appeal to 1 Cor 11:27.
That’s a classic example of bad exegesis. If your interpretation generates an unacceptable consequence, the solution is to question your original interpretation–not to salvage your original interpretation by introducing another text which wasn’t written with a view to the first text, or vice versa.
1 Cor 11:27 is not the context of Jn 6:51.
“It is relevant because these disciples did not recognize Jesus through His preaching; they recognized Him through the eucharistizing.”
That’s flawed on several grounds:
i) You’re using one question-begging appeal to prop up another question-begging appeal. You’re using your Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24 to justify your Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24. But before you can even begin to do that, you need to establish the Eucharist interpretation of Lk 24. For example, the same words (“took…blest…broke…gave”) are also used in Luke’s account of the feeding of the 5000 (9:6). Do you think the feeding of the 5000 was a celebration of the Mass?
ii) Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24, that, of itself, does nothing to prove the Eucharistic interpretation of Jn 6.
iii) Finally, as I said before, Jesus is visibly present in Lk 24. But, according to transubstantiation, he’s invisibly present in the Host. That’s hardly the same thing.
What is more, Catholics don’t recognize the real presence in the Host. There’s no act of perception. Rather, they simply believe Jesus to be present in deference to Catholic dogma. That’s not at all comparable to the experience of the two disciples in Lk 24.
“The preaching of the Scriptures did not bring these men to Christ, it was the sacrament of the Eucharist that did.”
i) You’re assuming, without argument, the Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24.
ii) You’re committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
iii) There’s nothing inherently Eucharistic about a recognition scene. Take the recognition scene in Lk 1:22. Is that Eucharistic too?
“I write: I disagree with your assessment. The Mass is exactly the type of event as recorded in Lk. 24.”
You’re merely asserting that they’re exactly the same while ignoring the reason I gave for the disanalogy. Is Jesus visibly present at the Mass? Is Jesus up there at the altar, breaking the bread?
“You assume that your categorization is the correct one but for me to agree with that, you have to first show me that the Church as established by the Apostles used your categories to explain the Scriptures and their teachings.”
There’s very funny considering the way in which Thomism uses Aristotelian categories to explain the Eucharist. Was Aristotle one of the apostles?
4:42 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“I respond: Since when? Using typology was perfectly acceptable to the ECF’s and in fact preached that the events that I referenced prefigured the Eucharist. I already gave you what St. Augustine wrote-argue with him.”
St. Augustine didn’t write the Fourth Gospel. St. John wrote the Fourth Gospel. To arrive at the correct interpretation of Jn 6, what matters is what the narrator (John) understood, and not what a church father understood.
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs. My Church recognizes them as authorities. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
I didn’t mount an argument from authority. People generally resort to authority when they run out of reasons.
So, when you find your back to the wall, you retreat into your turtle shell of vicious circularity. But an obvious problem with that move is that other folks can make the same move:
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The Church of Rome recognizes the fathers as authorities. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognizes Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as authorities. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The General Church of the New Jerusalem recognizes Swedenborg as our authority. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? Lakewood Church recognizes Joel Osteen as our authority. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The Church of Satan recognizes the Anton LaVey as our authority. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
Moving along:
“You are imposing your modern view on the word ‘symbol’ in a way the Early Church would not have recognized or agreed with.”
And you’re imposing your Catholic view on the word “symbol” in a way the Bible writers would not have recognized or agreed with.
“I respond: Obviously the benediction against the 'minim' was added to keep Christians out of the synagogues. Or have your researches indicate otherwise? I would be happy to consider your evidence.”
You have problems following your own argument. You indicated that the Catholic liturgy copied stuff from the Jewish liturgy. So I asked you if that included the 18th Benediction.
“As you have rightly and duly noted, this is an analogy just like ‘I am the door’ or ‘I am the vine.’ It could have been understood merely as metaphor (in the first sense of the word), but Jesus goes on to explain His analogy. He says: ‘This bread is my flesh, which I give for the life of the world’.”
That explanation doesn’t shift it from being “merely” metaphorical to something else. To the contrary, the explanation reproduces the same figurative imagery.
“He goes on tell them next that it is the same flesh that will be given up on the Cross-a true physical presence.”
In which case it doesn’t denote the institution of the Eucharist.
4:44 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“He then says that this flesh must be eaten by those who would follow Him. Jesus leaves no room for doubt here. If the flesh that Jesus says we are to eat for eternal life is meant only as a 'metaphor’ as in a figurative way or merely in the rational enlightened understanding of word ‘symbol’ then the flesh that bore our iniquities, the flesh of the crucifixion is only a metaphor or symbolic. John 6:51 clearly and plainly shows that Jesus equates the two.”
i) You lack a basic grasp of what a symbol or metaphor means. The fact that a symbol or metaphor may take a literal referent does nothing to make the symbol or metaphor literal in itself. The symbol is one thing, and the thing it stands for is another.
Try to master the meaning of basic terms and concepts.
ii) If Jesus is really alluding to the crucifixion, then the figurative imagery of eating bread and drinking blood shares the same historic referent. It’s a metaphorical description of the same event, as well as the appropriate response (i.e. faith) to that event. The same event can either be described in literal or figurative terms.
The real question at issue is the identity of the referent.
“If Jesus is going to be physically on the Cross, then He is physically present in the Bread.”
That is both a logical and exegetical non sequitur.
“Moreover John 6:51 states, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I WILL GIVE is my flesh for the life of the world’ suggesting that Jesus will give us this bread in the future.”
Coming down from heaven refers to the Incarnation, not the Eucharist. It’s in his preexistent identity as the “bread of life” that he comes down from heaven (i.e. becomes incarnate). This antedates the institution of the Lord’s Supper.
The “bread” he gives is his sacrificial death, not the Eucharist.
“The literalness of the passage is evident in the fact that many walked away from Jesus, including many of His own disciples.”
Literal in reference to what? The death of the Messiah–or the Lord’s Supper?
“However, when it came to the Apostles, their faith allowed them to understand and more importantly to accept Jesus was saying.”
You’re trying to ride two different horses here. If you say they were offended by Jesus because they took him literally, then you presumably think they understood what he meant–since you yourself champion the literal interpretation.
If, on the other hand, you reserve that understanding for the apostles, then you can’t use the reaction of the crowd to establish the meaning of the passage.
“I write: ??? ... Considering the fact that the different sects of Judaism that existed at the time of Jesus each had different canons, I do not see how this defeats my argument.”
I see that you’re changing your argument in mid-stream. You originally asked me if I’d ever attended a service at a synagogue, and you used that as a reference point. But that, of course, has reference to modern Judaism, not 1C Judaism. Now, however, you’re backtracking to 1C Judaism, which is hardly the same thing.
I answered you on your own grounds. It would save time if you made more of an effort to keep track of your own arguments. If you’re using modern Judaism as your reference point, then that includes the Hebrew canon.
“My response: As to (i ), appending my comments to Jerry, you can not seriously be asking me to equate what a local council did in response to a situation that arose in 589 AD with what the first Christians believed and did, are you?”
i) You classify the 12th ecumenical council (Lateran IV) as a local council?
ii) And, no, I don’t equate what an ecumenical council did with what the first Christians did and believed. That’s the problem. Lateran discriminates against the Jews in a way unthinkable by NT standards.
4:46 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“Or are you contending that the Mass did not exist until after 589 AD?”
Where do you come up with these things? You turned this into an issue of Jewish influence. I therefore countered by drawing attention to anti-Semitism in traditional Catholicism. That would obviously limit Jewish influence.
For some reason you have a persistent problem following your own argument. You say something, I respond to you on your own terms. It shouldn’t be that hard for you to keep track. Just remember what you said. Is that asking too much?
“As far as (ii), well we do know where the Apostles and the early Christians hung out according to Acts.”
One place they hung out was the Temple. Do you think the Mass was celebrated in the Temple?
“Moreover, given what is found in the Epistles of SS. Paul, James, Peter and John as well as Revelation together with the Didache, the writings of SS. Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr and Hippolytus, we can certainly can do more than merely speculate as to the Mass.”
i) You need to specify your prooftexts for the Mass in Peter, Paul, James, and John.
ii) What the church fathers thought about the Mass, even assuming they held a uniform view, is secondary to what NT writers thought about the Eucharist.
iii) Moreover, this is irrelevant to the viewpoint of the Jewish audience to whom Jesus was speaking in Jn 6. Jesus wasn’t speaking to Hippolytus.
“To be honest, in the 20-30 or so Baptist services I have been to in my life, I have only seen one service that had any sort of communion there.”
Since they don’t celebrate communion every Sunday, you’d need to attend a communion service to know how it’s celebrated.
“That does not remotely remind me of a Mass.”
Once again, you miss the point. Did I compare a Baptist communion service to the Mass? No. Try to pay attention. I compared Baptist and Lutheran communion services.
And I pointed out that you couldn’t infer the Baptist or Lutheran theology of communion from their external rites.
Likewise, comparing the surface phenomena of Catholic and Jewish liturgies is of limited value in determining what their rites signify to the respective worshipers.
“My response: You are speculating here. The real answer is that we don’t know because St. John didn’t think it was important for us to know.”
Like many Catholics, you suffer from self-reinforcing ignorance. You don’t know because you don’t’ think it’s important to know, and so you don’t’ inform yourself.
John is quite clear on what Jesus’ listeners were in a position to know. That crops up throughout the Fourth Gospel. They were obligated to believe his claims because his claims were attested by OT Scriptures as well as his miraculous works.
“The NT was written to supplement what the Apostles, bishops and priests had taught the members of the early Church.”
i) Even on Catholic grounds, I hardly think that Vatican II would demote the NT to a merely supplementary role in relation to Sacred Tradition.
ii) You’re also committing an elementary blunder by failing to distinguish between the audience for a book, and the audience for a speech recorded in a book.
A modern historian may write a biography about Lincoln. In his biography, he may quote the Gettysburg Address. But the audience for that 1863 speech is hardly interchangeable with the audience for a biography published in 2009.
And the historian himself, even though he’s writing for the benefit of a modern audience, would interpret the Gettysburg Address in light of background information available to Lincoln and his audience.
You fail to draw that distinction because you really don’t care about the Bible. You only care about your sectarian traditions. As such, you make no serious effort to understand the Bible on its own terms. For you, the Bible is just a cipher for Catholic theology. In principle, any cipher would do.
It’s evil to be so indifferent to the word of God.
4:46 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“What background knowledge the Jews had was irrelevant.”
When Jesus is addressing a Jewish audience at a particular place and time, the background knowledge of the target audience is quite relevant to the correct interpretation of what he said–unless you think Jesus went out of his way to be misunderstood, and then blamed his audience for their failure to understand something when he deliberately created that misconception in the first place.
“I write: I do not see how my argument is undercut. The Jews were in no position to know Christ’s future crucifixion and Ascension either but it did not stop Our Lord from referring to these things in this pericope.”
Which would undercut your argument on both counts.
I, by contrast, distinguished between general knowledge of a certain type of event (e.g. a violent death) and specific knowledge of a particular event (e.g. crucifixion).
Jesus’ audience had sufficient background information to grasp an allusion to the death of the Messiah.
“My response: Jesus imparted general instructions to His audience that they were to eat His flesh which He was going to give for the life of the world.”
You’re assuming, without benefit of argument, that these are instructions for what to do at Mass–rather than figurative allusions to the Messiah’s redemptive death.
“Later Jesus did provide His followers with more specific information in the form of His institution of the Last Supper (which they obviously understood by virtue of Lk. 24, various passages in Acts, and 1 Cor. 10 and 11) and His Crucifixion and Resurrection and Ascension.”
And since the audience for the Break of Life discourse was uninformed in that respect, a reference to the institution of the Mass would be unintelligible. Yet the narrator treats them as culpable for their refusal to believe Jesus. How can they be blameworthy for disbelieving Jesus’ words when, on your interpretation, they’d be in no position to know what he was talking about?
“Why not? As I stated, John was filling in the blanks of the other inspired writers. John 6explains why the Eucharist is ultimately the center of Christian life.”
You’re like the Red Queen: you keep running without actually moving. You need to demonstrate that John was filling in the blanks.
“To be honest with you, my view is that Protestant attempts to distinguish themselves from Catholics is all falderal and they interpret the Scriptures in light of their Tradition exactly the same way Catholics do.”
I’m a Calvinist. But I didn’t grow up in a Reformed denomination. Therefore, the Reformed tradition was not my hermeneutical grid. Try that argument on someone else for size.
“You claim you are different so you have an excuse not to submit to the authority of the Catholic Church.”
You haven’t given me any good reason why I should submit to the authority of the Catholic church. Indeed, to judge by your performance thus far, you’ve given me good reasons not to.
“But the bottom line is that you submit to the authority of someone besides yourself even though you claim that there are such things such as ‘private judgment’ ‘sola scriptura’ and other notions.”
Because you’re Catholic, you’re conditioned to think in authoritarian categories. You’re incapable of framing the issue any other way. Therefore, you project that framework onto everyone else.
It doesn’t occur to you that I might agree with a theologian or commentator, not because I treat him as an authority figure or take what he says on the authority of the speaker, but simply because he presents a logical argument for his position, based on relevant evidence.
4:47 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“Protestants are not tabulae rasa which is what would be necessary for you actually practice what you claim.”
No, we don’t have to be tabulae rasa. Rather, we should be aware of our operating assumptions, and also be prepared to adjust our operating assumptions in light of God’s word.
“For example, someone before you claimed that they found in the Bible the notion of ‘sola scriptura’ or explained it to you in a certain way. By choosing to believe in their explanation , whether it be Luther, Calvin, your minister, or your teachers, you are acknowledging their authority to define or elucidate that doctrine. You didn’t read the Bible and come up with the notion of sola scriptura all by yourself. Someone told you that it was there and you chose to believe them.”
With all due respect, this isn’t very bright. There’s an obvious difference between accepting what someone says because he can make a good argument for his position, and accepting what he says on his authority.
There are times when we accept the word of an expert witness because he seems to know more about the issue than we do.
But it’s quite inept, as well as self-incriminating, for you to suggest that the only reason we believe something is because we treat the speaker as an authority figure.
If you’re going to use that argument, such as it is, then you’ve preemptively destroyed any possibility of doing Catholic apologetics. In that event, I have no more reason to submit to the pope than I have to submit to the grand ayatollah. I have no reason beyond a random appeal to some putative authority figure.
You’ve turned all religious allegiance into a raffle. It’s just a matter of chance that you pulled the Catholic ticket out of the revolving wheel. Had you reached in at a different time, you’d just as well be a Shiite.
“I must have missed that memo at the last secret meeting of the local chapter of The Heinous Evil Catholic League of Apologists (THECLA). Seriously, I am aware that some liberal Catholic Bible scholars have adopted Protestant hermeneutical methods but unfortunately I haven’t seen Fr. Fitzmyer’s name on Dei Verbum, Divino Afflante Spiritu, Providentissimus Deus, or mentioned even in any of Pope Benedict XVI’s writings about exegesis and hermeneutics (I do admit that I haven't read them all). Can you please show me in any of those documents where it says that I have to adopt Fr. Fitzmyer's ideas as my own or itemize all of those Protestant hermeneutical techniques I am supposed to use.”
This is another example of your self-reinforcing ignorance–even in reference to your own religious tradition. Fitzmyer walks you through the history of how the Magisterium came to embrace such methods.
4:48 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“In regards, to Fr. Fitzmyer, I do not disagree that the Catholic Church does recognize the value of historical criticism in exegesis, I merely do not agree with Fr. Fitzmyer’s views on it. The man does not recognize many of the events of the OT as historically accurate and contends that there are errors in the Bible. Perhaps such notions is in accord with your exegetical outlook, but I do not accept Fr. Fitzmyer’s views particularly since they devalue the role of Tradition, the concept that the Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures to be written, and that the Scriptures are inerrant.”
Fitzmyer is not a Catholic dissent, like Küng. He represents mainstream Catholic views of Scripture which have never been censured by the Vatican. The Vatican is in a position to crack down if it wanted to. His views would have been out of bounds in the days of Pius IX or Leo XIII, but not today.
12:17 PM, July 03, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“Thus, the argument between Messrs. Bellisario and Fan about whether the proof texts at John 6 or 1 Cor. 11 are to be understood as reality vs. metaphor is wrong-headed from the start. Catholic doctrine requires that the words in these passages about the bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, are to be understood as both.”
In other words, Catholic dogma predetermines how the Scriptures are to be understood. Scripture doesn’t determine Catholic dogma.
“It should be noted that those scriptural passages comparing Jesus to a door or to a vine do not help the Protestant case here because in those scripture passages, Our Lord is not talking about the institution of a sacrament.”
Of course, the Lord’s Supper hadn’t been instituted at the time Jesus was addressing his Jewish audience in Jn 6. therefore, Hoffer’s observation undercuts his Eucharistic interpretation.
“First, Mr. Fan fails to take into account the disciplina arcani that the early Church practiced in connection with mysteries of the Eucharist.”
i) I’m sure that TF is aware of that.
ii) More to the point, appeal to a disciplina arcani was a standard tactic of heretical esoteric cults. That’s a foundation of the hermetic tradition.
6:44 PM, June 28, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“I respond: Nope. You put the horse before the cart.”
Nope. I simply responded to you in terms of how you chose to word your original statement. If anyone is putting the horse before the cart, that would be you.
“The teachings of the apostles passed down through their successors, the bishops and early Church fathers as to how the Scriptures were in fact understood predetermined Catholic dogma.”
i) That’s a nice illustration of assuming what you need to prove.
ii) Moreover, if word-of-mouth was the mode of transmission intended by God, then the NT is superfluous. Who needs Scripture if oral tradition will suffice?
“Regardless, the establishment of Catholic dogmas is not the arbitrary exercise as your statement seems to imply.”
What you’ve offered is an arbitrary assertion in lieu of an argument.
“Did someone come before you and predetermine what the doctrines or dogmatic expressions members were to hold or did someone hand you a bible and said ‘go figure everything out for yourself?’ I do not see why the notion of a Church having defined dogma presents a problem for anyone.”
That comparison suffers from a fatal fallacy of equivocation. In Reformed theological method, doctrine is supposed to be the result of exegesis, not tradition.
“As far as disciplina arcani goes, Origen, St. Basil, St Augustine and others documented this practice of the early Church.”
i) To my knowledge, appeal to a disciplina arcani to explain away the silence of the church fathers on later Catholic dogmas goes back to the 17C Catholic apologist Emmanuel Schelstrate.
ii) His argument was rendered obsolete by Newman’s theory of development. So your appeal is badly out of date.
iii) And you’re also ducking the issue of how such an appeal can equally be used by heretical esoteric cults (e.g. Gospel of Thomas 92).
“I was merely reporting on a historical fact in regards to the Eucharist, not commenting on whether the practice is laudatory in all instances.”
No, what you’re doing is to dodge the implications of an argument that you yourself introduced. You said:
“It should be noted that those scriptural passages comparing Jesus to a door or to a vine do not help the Protestant case here because in those scripture passages, Our Lord is not talking about the institution of a sacrament.”
To which I responded:
“Of course, the Lord’s Supper hadn’t been instituted at the time Jesus was addressing his Jewish audience in Jn 6. therefore, Hoffer’s observation undercuts his Eucharistic interpretation.”
I’m still waiting for your counterargument. Evidently, you have none to offer.
“But then again, Mt. 7:6 does state that we are not give what is holy to the dogs or throw pearls to swine. So it would seem that Our Lord did not necessarily have a problem with the practice.”
You need to demonstrate, through actual exegesis, that this has any reference to withholding information about the Mass from outsiders.
10:11 AM, June 29, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“I do not see how. As a TA, do you give instructions before you ask your students to do something or afterwards? What Jesus said was no different.”
That illustration ignores the actual context of Jn 6. Jesus his faulting his listeners for their refusal to credit his claims. This assumes that at the time he spoke, they were in a position to grasp what he said. If, however, this is a cryptic allusion to the future institution of the Mass, then they’d be in no position to know what he’s talking about since, on that interpretation, the Mass had yet to be instituted–and there’s no precursor to that institution.
So a correct interpretation of Jn 6 depends on background knowledge which was already available to the audience Jesus was addressing.
“Another way of looking at it~Jesus's words here indicate that was a promise of what was to come, hence Jesus uses words like ‘if,’ ‘he that’, and ‘shall’, all of which indicate something that will occur after satisfaction of a precondition.”
You’re now assuming, without benefit of argument, that the future referent is the Mass. In context, however, Jn 6 foreshadows Jn 19. And based on the Jesus’ evident fulfillment of OT motifs which they already had at their disposal (i.e. his miracles, OT scriptures) when he spoke, they were in a position to discern the prefigurement of his redemptive death.
The Fourth Gospel deliberately omits any account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper–in comparison to Luke. Rather, we have a steady build up to the climactic events of chap. 19.
“My reply: Of course your argument suffers because you commit the genetic fallacy of assuming that the ‘Reformed theological method,’ whatever that purports to be and assuming that you can get every Reformed Protestant to agree on the definition, is the correct method to be used in exegesis without offering any proof that it IS the correct method to be used in exegesis. The novelty of your methodology over the older Catholic use of Tradition to aid in understanding Scriptures is not proof that your methodology is somehow better. Perhaps you can point me to the bible passage that states that we are all bound to use the ‘reformed theological method’ to understand the Scriptures. I didn't find that phrase in My Strong's concordance.”
I see that you have problems following your own argument. You attempted to mount an argument from analogy–from the fact that both your church and Reformed churches have creeds. If, however, your parallel breaks down at a critical point of comparison, then the argument from analogy is invalidated by a fatal equivocation of terms.
It’s irrelevant whether or not you agree with Reformed theological method. That’s not the point. The point is whether your argument from analogy is valid as an argument from analogy. If it’s disanalogous where it needs to be analogous, then it fails as an argument from analogy.
3:41 PM, June 29, 2009
steve said...
“[Hoffer] If that is what the Holy Spirit is saying to you in this passage, so be it, but it seems to be a rather restrictive reading of this passage particularly in light of Jn. 6:51. But what do I know?”
i) I didn’t invoke the Holy Spirit to justify my interpretation.
ii) My interpretation is perfectly consistent with Jn 6:51–where the heavenly bread is a metaphor for Jesus’ Incarnation and immolation.
iii) BTW, do you think every communicant is heavenbound? Is every Catholic who ever took communion either in heaven or heavenbound? That’s what Jn 6:51 entails-if you construe it eucharistically.
“I am sure you know better too than those fellers Jesus met on the road to Emmaus after He rose from the dead. Obviously, they were mistaken that there was anything special about Jesus taking bread and blessing it, then breaking it and giving it to them. [Lk. 24:28-35].”
i) Are you using Lk 24 to interpret Jn 6? Why think that’s relevant?
ii) You’re also equivocating. What makes the incident in Lk 24 special? The bread? Or Jesus?
In Lk 24, there would be nothing special about the breaking of bread apart from the Jesus standing before them, breaking the break, and distributing the bread.
That’s quite different from transubstantiation, with Jesus invisibly concealed under the species of bread and wine. If the Mass were actually like Lk 24, it would be a very different event!
“Oh, when you write ‘the Mass had yet to be instituted–and there’s no precursor to that institution’ does this mean that I have to disregard all that bread and wine offering nonsense by Melchezidek, and all that sacrifice stuff at Lev. 23 and 24?”
You’re committing a basic level confusion:
i) OT types don’t prefigure NT sacraments like communion. Rather, they prefigure events in the life of Christ, like his redemptive death.
ii) Put another way, they symbolize the same thing the sacraments symbolize. They don’t symbolize sacraments; rather, they symbolize what sacraments like communion stand for: the underlying historic event. It’s not a symbol of another symbol. Rather, both are symbols of a common event.
“And have you ever attended a synagogue service, like the first Christians did? I have and they sure seem to be a lot of similarities with the Catholic Mass. Those Jewish folks even have a lot of the same prayers.”
i) Does that include the 18th Benediction?
ii) I also notice that you’re not attempting to exegete Jn 6. Instead, you’re resorting to anachronistic comparisons with modern synagogues.
“And read from the some of the same books of the Bible that we do.”
Of course, the canon of the Hebrew Bible is not the same as the Catholic OT canon. Thanks for reminding us of the discontinuities between Judaism and Catholicism–which nicely undercuts your argument.
“Did they copy all that stuff from us or do you think that Jewish forms of worship may have had an influence on the formulation of Christian liturgies?”
i) Given the amount of anti-Semitism in traditional Roman Catholicism, that’s a good question.
ii) Moreover, you can’t prove very much from religious rites since there can be a lot of similarity in practice even though the underlying theology is quite different. There’s a lot of similarity in the way Baptists and Lutherans celebrate communion. But they don’t have the same theological understanding of the rite.
12:46 PM, June 30, 2009
steve said...
“[Hoffer] Does the correct interpretation of Jn. 6 depend on background knowledge which was already available to the audience Jesus was addressing? This Chapter suggests that Jesus addressed more than one audience, but for argument’s sake I will bite…”
i) For the speech to be comprehensible to the listeners, it can’t very well assume knowledge which is inaccessible to the listener.
ii) There may be a shift from the scene of the miracle to the adjacent synagogue where the subsequent debate took place, but we’re still dealing with a Jewish audience before the institution of the Lord’s Supper.
“What background knowledge did the audience Jesus address have?”
I already said: knowledge of the OT, as well as Jesus’ fulfillment, up to that point, of OT types and prophecies.
“The way I read the passage is that Jesus’ audiences understood Jesus only too well what He was talking about and despite the signs He showed them only the previous day, most of the audiences, Jesus’ disciples and followers included, still could not accept His teaching. ”
And if, according to you, Jn 6 was actually referring to the future institution of the Mass, then they’d be in no position to know what he’s talking about. To the extent that they understood him well enough to resist what he was saying, that undercuts your argument.
“And what do you think goes on at the Mass? We play bingo? The Mass is one the primary methods used by Jesus’ followers to pass along what they discerned to subsequent generations in the Church.”
As usual, you have a knack for missing the point. There’s an obvious difference between general knowledge of a certain kind of event, and specific knowledge of a particular event.
On the basis of Jesus’ fulfillment of OT types and prophecies, they were in a position to know that he would die a sacrificial death. That involves general knowledge of a certain kind of event.
They would be in no position to know about the institution of the Lord’s Supper–which involves specific knowledge of a particular event.
“Considering that St. John the Evangelist wrote his Gospel decades after St. Paul wrote 1 Cor. that so clearly describes Christians celebrating the Lord’s Supper, do you think he had a need to do so as well? Or is it possible that John wrote his Gospel to illustrate some other points that God wanted him to write about?”
Once again, that undercuts your own argument. You have self-defeating habit–which simplifies my task.
If John wrote his Gospel to illustrate some “other” points–points other than the Lord’s Supper-then by your own logic you can’t very well assume that Jn 6 is illustrating the Lord’s Supper.
“Now you have claimed (without proving so) that your denomination uses a different methodology of formulating dogma and as a result my argument is somehow invalidated by that .”
Of course it uses a different methodology. You yourself, as a Catholic, think that Catholic theological method different from Protestant theological method. Hence the debates over sola Scriptura, &c.
“I am trying to understand the basis for your conclusory assertions that somehow the Reformed theological method, whatever that purports to be, is substantively different or better than the typological, allegorical and other methods used by the Early Church Fathers and the Catholic Church.”
i) No, your argument was an argument from analogy. That’s a different issue than which theological method is better.
ii) As to which exegetical methods are used by the Catholic church, your information here–as elsewhere–is badly out of date. Catholic Bible scholars have adopted Protestant hermeneutical methods. And they do so with the sanction of the modern Magisterium. Try reading Joseph Fitzmyer’s The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method.
You need to wake up and take a look under the hood of your own denomination.
12:47 PM, June 30, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“The first rule of reading the Scriptures is to do so prayerfully.”
No, the first rule of reading the Scriptures is to respect original intent.
Professing believers from different theological traditions can all read the Scriptures prayerfully, and arrive at mutually exclusive interpretations. So that’s hardly the first rule of reading the Scriptures.
“My interpretation of Jn 6:51 is consistent too if one understands that Christ is talking sacramentally here. My understanding necessarily incorporates your interpretation and adds to it.”
No, it doesn’t add to it, any more than you can add a square to a circle. You can’t add a literal interpretation to a figurative interpretation.
“My reply: Scripture has to be understood in the context of all of Scripture. In light of the admonition at 1 Cor. 11:27, the answer to both questions here is no.”
On the one hand you interpret Jn 6:51 Eucharistically. On the other hand, when a Eucharistic interpretation of the wording would entail the salvation of every single communicant, you disregard the actual wording of Jn 6:51 and arbitrarily restrict its scope by an extraneous appeal to 1 Cor 11:27.
That’s a classic example of bad exegesis. If your interpretation generates an unacceptable consequence, the solution is to question your original interpretation–not to salvage your original interpretation by introducing another text which wasn’t written with a view to the first text, or vice versa.
1 Cor 11:27 is not the context of Jn 6:51.
“It is relevant because these disciples did not recognize Jesus through His preaching; they recognized Him through the eucharistizing.”
That’s flawed on several grounds:
i) You’re using one question-begging appeal to prop up another question-begging appeal. You’re using your Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24 to justify your Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24. But before you can even begin to do that, you need to establish the Eucharist interpretation of Lk 24. For example, the same words (“took…blest…broke…gave”) are also used in Luke’s account of the feeding of the 5000 (9:6). Do you think the feeding of the 5000 was a celebration of the Mass?
ii) Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24, that, of itself, does nothing to prove the Eucharistic interpretation of Jn 6.
iii) Finally, as I said before, Jesus is visibly present in Lk 24. But, according to transubstantiation, he’s invisibly present in the Host. That’s hardly the same thing.
What is more, Catholics don’t recognize the real presence in the Host. There’s no act of perception. Rather, they simply believe Jesus to be present in deference to Catholic dogma. That’s not at all comparable to the experience of the two disciples in Lk 24.
“The preaching of the Scriptures did not bring these men to Christ, it was the sacrament of the Eucharist that did.”
i) You’re assuming, without argument, the Eucharistic interpretation of Lk 24.
ii) You’re committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
iii) There’s nothing inherently Eucharistic about a recognition scene. Take the recognition scene in Lk 1:22. Is that Eucharistic too?
“I write: I disagree with your assessment. The Mass is exactly the type of event as recorded in Lk. 24.”
You’re merely asserting that they’re exactly the same while ignoring the reason I gave for the disanalogy. Is Jesus visibly present at the Mass? Is Jesus up there at the altar, breaking the bread?
“You assume that your categorization is the correct one but for me to agree with that, you have to first show me that the Church as established by the Apostles used your categories to explain the Scriptures and their teachings.”
There’s very funny considering the way in which Thomism uses Aristotelian categories to explain the Eucharist. Was Aristotle one of the apostles?
4:42 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“I respond: Since when? Using typology was perfectly acceptable to the ECF’s and in fact preached that the events that I referenced prefigured the Eucharist. I already gave you what St. Augustine wrote-argue with him.”
St. Augustine didn’t write the Fourth Gospel. St. John wrote the Fourth Gospel. To arrive at the correct interpretation of Jn 6, what matters is what the narrator (John) understood, and not what a church father understood.
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs. My Church recognizes them as authorities. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
I didn’t mount an argument from authority. People generally resort to authority when they run out of reasons.
So, when you find your back to the wall, you retreat into your turtle shell of vicious circularity. But an obvious problem with that move is that other folks can make the same move:
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The Church of Rome recognizes the fathers as authorities. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognizes Joseph Smith and Brigham Young as authorities. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The General Church of the New Jerusalem recognizes Swedenborg as our authority. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? Lakewood Church recognizes Joel Osteen as our authority. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
“Further, Why should I accept your authority over theirs? The Church of Satan recognizes the Anton LaVey as our authority. My Church does not recognize you as one.”
Moving along:
“You are imposing your modern view on the word ‘symbol’ in a way the Early Church would not have recognized or agreed with.”
And you’re imposing your Catholic view on the word “symbol” in a way the Bible writers would not have recognized or agreed with.
“I respond: Obviously the benediction against the 'minim' was added to keep Christians out of the synagogues. Or have your researches indicate otherwise? I would be happy to consider your evidence.”
You have problems following your own argument. You indicated that the Catholic liturgy copied stuff from the Jewish liturgy. So I asked you if that included the 18th Benediction.
“As you have rightly and duly noted, this is an analogy just like ‘I am the door’ or ‘I am the vine.’ It could have been understood merely as metaphor (in the first sense of the word), but Jesus goes on to explain His analogy. He says: ‘This bread is my flesh, which I give for the life of the world’.”
That explanation doesn’t shift it from being “merely” metaphorical to something else. To the contrary, the explanation reproduces the same figurative imagery.
“He goes on tell them next that it is the same flesh that will be given up on the Cross-a true physical presence.”
In which case it doesn’t denote the institution of the Eucharist.
4:44 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“He then says that this flesh must be eaten by those who would follow Him. Jesus leaves no room for doubt here. If the flesh that Jesus says we are to eat for eternal life is meant only as a 'metaphor’ as in a figurative way or merely in the rational enlightened understanding of word ‘symbol’ then the flesh that bore our iniquities, the flesh of the crucifixion is only a metaphor or symbolic. John 6:51 clearly and plainly shows that Jesus equates the two.”
i) You lack a basic grasp of what a symbol or metaphor means. The fact that a symbol or metaphor may take a literal referent does nothing to make the symbol or metaphor literal in itself. The symbol is one thing, and the thing it stands for is another.
Try to master the meaning of basic terms and concepts.
ii) If Jesus is really alluding to the crucifixion, then the figurative imagery of eating bread and drinking blood shares the same historic referent. It’s a metaphorical description of the same event, as well as the appropriate response (i.e. faith) to that event. The same event can either be described in literal or figurative terms.
The real question at issue is the identity of the referent.
“If Jesus is going to be physically on the Cross, then He is physically present in the Bread.”
That is both a logical and exegetical non sequitur.
“Moreover John 6:51 states, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I WILL GIVE is my flesh for the life of the world’ suggesting that Jesus will give us this bread in the future.”
Coming down from heaven refers to the Incarnation, not the Eucharist. It’s in his preexistent identity as the “bread of life” that he comes down from heaven (i.e. becomes incarnate). This antedates the institution of the Lord’s Supper.
The “bread” he gives is his sacrificial death, not the Eucharist.
“The literalness of the passage is evident in the fact that many walked away from Jesus, including many of His own disciples.”
Literal in reference to what? The death of the Messiah–or the Lord’s Supper?
“However, when it came to the Apostles, their faith allowed them to understand and more importantly to accept Jesus was saying.”
You’re trying to ride two different horses here. If you say they were offended by Jesus because they took him literally, then you presumably think they understood what he meant–since you yourself champion the literal interpretation.
If, on the other hand, you reserve that understanding for the apostles, then you can’t use the reaction of the crowd to establish the meaning of the passage.
“I write: ??? ... Considering the fact that the different sects of Judaism that existed at the time of Jesus each had different canons, I do not see how this defeats my argument.”
I see that you’re changing your argument in mid-stream. You originally asked me if I’d ever attended a service at a synagogue, and you used that as a reference point. But that, of course, has reference to modern Judaism, not 1C Judaism. Now, however, you’re backtracking to 1C Judaism, which is hardly the same thing.
I answered you on your own grounds. It would save time if you made more of an effort to keep track of your own arguments. If you’re using modern Judaism as your reference point, then that includes the Hebrew canon.
“My response: As to (i ), appending my comments to Jerry, you can not seriously be asking me to equate what a local council did in response to a situation that arose in 589 AD with what the first Christians believed and did, are you?”
i) You classify the 12th ecumenical council (Lateran IV) as a local council?
ii) And, no, I don’t equate what an ecumenical council did with what the first Christians did and believed. That’s the problem. Lateran discriminates against the Jews in a way unthinkable by NT standards.
4:46 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“Or are you contending that the Mass did not exist until after 589 AD?”
Where do you come up with these things? You turned this into an issue of Jewish influence. I therefore countered by drawing attention to anti-Semitism in traditional Catholicism. That would obviously limit Jewish influence.
For some reason you have a persistent problem following your own argument. You say something, I respond to you on your own terms. It shouldn’t be that hard for you to keep track. Just remember what you said. Is that asking too much?
“As far as (ii), well we do know where the Apostles and the early Christians hung out according to Acts.”
One place they hung out was the Temple. Do you think the Mass was celebrated in the Temple?
“Moreover, given what is found in the Epistles of SS. Paul, James, Peter and John as well as Revelation together with the Didache, the writings of SS. Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr and Hippolytus, we can certainly can do more than merely speculate as to the Mass.”
i) You need to specify your prooftexts for the Mass in Peter, Paul, James, and John.
ii) What the church fathers thought about the Mass, even assuming they held a uniform view, is secondary to what NT writers thought about the Eucharist.
iii) Moreover, this is irrelevant to the viewpoint of the Jewish audience to whom Jesus was speaking in Jn 6. Jesus wasn’t speaking to Hippolytus.
“To be honest, in the 20-30 or so Baptist services I have been to in my life, I have only seen one service that had any sort of communion there.”
Since they don’t celebrate communion every Sunday, you’d need to attend a communion service to know how it’s celebrated.
“That does not remotely remind me of a Mass.”
Once again, you miss the point. Did I compare a Baptist communion service to the Mass? No. Try to pay attention. I compared Baptist and Lutheran communion services.
And I pointed out that you couldn’t infer the Baptist or Lutheran theology of communion from their external rites.
Likewise, comparing the surface phenomena of Catholic and Jewish liturgies is of limited value in determining what their rites signify to the respective worshipers.
“My response: You are speculating here. The real answer is that we don’t know because St. John didn’t think it was important for us to know.”
Like many Catholics, you suffer from self-reinforcing ignorance. You don’t know because you don’t’ think it’s important to know, and so you don’t’ inform yourself.
John is quite clear on what Jesus’ listeners were in a position to know. That crops up throughout the Fourth Gospel. They were obligated to believe his claims because his claims were attested by OT Scriptures as well as his miraculous works.
“The NT was written to supplement what the Apostles, bishops and priests had taught the members of the early Church.”
i) Even on Catholic grounds, I hardly think that Vatican II would demote the NT to a merely supplementary role in relation to Sacred Tradition.
ii) You’re also committing an elementary blunder by failing to distinguish between the audience for a book, and the audience for a speech recorded in a book.
A modern historian may write a biography about Lincoln. In his biography, he may quote the Gettysburg Address. But the audience for that 1863 speech is hardly interchangeable with the audience for a biography published in 2009.
And the historian himself, even though he’s writing for the benefit of a modern audience, would interpret the Gettysburg Address in light of background information available to Lincoln and his audience.
You fail to draw that distinction because you really don’t care about the Bible. You only care about your sectarian traditions. As such, you make no serious effort to understand the Bible on its own terms. For you, the Bible is just a cipher for Catholic theology. In principle, any cipher would do.
It’s evil to be so indifferent to the word of God.
4:46 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“What background knowledge the Jews had was irrelevant.”
When Jesus is addressing a Jewish audience at a particular place and time, the background knowledge of the target audience is quite relevant to the correct interpretation of what he said–unless you think Jesus went out of his way to be misunderstood, and then blamed his audience for their failure to understand something when he deliberately created that misconception in the first place.
“I write: I do not see how my argument is undercut. The Jews were in no position to know Christ’s future crucifixion and Ascension either but it did not stop Our Lord from referring to these things in this pericope.”
Which would undercut your argument on both counts.
I, by contrast, distinguished between general knowledge of a certain type of event (e.g. a violent death) and specific knowledge of a particular event (e.g. crucifixion).
Jesus’ audience had sufficient background information to grasp an allusion to the death of the Messiah.
“My response: Jesus imparted general instructions to His audience that they were to eat His flesh which He was going to give for the life of the world.”
You’re assuming, without benefit of argument, that these are instructions for what to do at Mass–rather than figurative allusions to the Messiah’s redemptive death.
“Later Jesus did provide His followers with more specific information in the form of His institution of the Last Supper (which they obviously understood by virtue of Lk. 24, various passages in Acts, and 1 Cor. 10 and 11) and His Crucifixion and Resurrection and Ascension.”
And since the audience for the Break of Life discourse was uninformed in that respect, a reference to the institution of the Mass would be unintelligible. Yet the narrator treats them as culpable for their refusal to believe Jesus. How can they be blameworthy for disbelieving Jesus’ words when, on your interpretation, they’d be in no position to know what he was talking about?
“Why not? As I stated, John was filling in the blanks of the other inspired writers. John 6explains why the Eucharist is ultimately the center of Christian life.”
You’re like the Red Queen: you keep running without actually moving. You need to demonstrate that John was filling in the blanks.
“To be honest with you, my view is that Protestant attempts to distinguish themselves from Catholics is all falderal and they interpret the Scriptures in light of their Tradition exactly the same way Catholics do.”
I’m a Calvinist. But I didn’t grow up in a Reformed denomination. Therefore, the Reformed tradition was not my hermeneutical grid. Try that argument on someone else for size.
“You claim you are different so you have an excuse not to submit to the authority of the Catholic Church.”
You haven’t given me any good reason why I should submit to the authority of the Catholic church. Indeed, to judge by your performance thus far, you’ve given me good reasons not to.
“But the bottom line is that you submit to the authority of someone besides yourself even though you claim that there are such things such as ‘private judgment’ ‘sola scriptura’ and other notions.”
Because you’re Catholic, you’re conditioned to think in authoritarian categories. You’re incapable of framing the issue any other way. Therefore, you project that framework onto everyone else.
It doesn’t occur to you that I might agree with a theologian or commentator, not because I treat him as an authority figure or take what he says on the authority of the speaker, but simply because he presents a logical argument for his position, based on relevant evidence.
4:47 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
“Protestants are not tabulae rasa which is what would be necessary for you actually practice what you claim.”
No, we don’t have to be tabulae rasa. Rather, we should be aware of our operating assumptions, and also be prepared to adjust our operating assumptions in light of God’s word.
“For example, someone before you claimed that they found in the Bible the notion of ‘sola scriptura’ or explained it to you in a certain way. By choosing to believe in their explanation , whether it be Luther, Calvin, your minister, or your teachers, you are acknowledging their authority to define or elucidate that doctrine. You didn’t read the Bible and come up with the notion of sola scriptura all by yourself. Someone told you that it was there and you chose to believe them.”
With all due respect, this isn’t very bright. There’s an obvious difference between accepting what someone says because he can make a good argument for his position, and accepting what he says on his authority.
There are times when we accept the word of an expert witness because he seems to know more about the issue than we do.
But it’s quite inept, as well as self-incriminating, for you to suggest that the only reason we believe something is because we treat the speaker as an authority figure.
If you’re going to use that argument, such as it is, then you’ve preemptively destroyed any possibility of doing Catholic apologetics. In that event, I have no more reason to submit to the pope than I have to submit to the grand ayatollah. I have no reason beyond a random appeal to some putative authority figure.
You’ve turned all religious allegiance into a raffle. It’s just a matter of chance that you pulled the Catholic ticket out of the revolving wheel. Had you reached in at a different time, you’d just as well be a Shiite.
“I must have missed that memo at the last secret meeting of the local chapter of The Heinous Evil Catholic League of Apologists (THECLA). Seriously, I am aware that some liberal Catholic Bible scholars have adopted Protestant hermeneutical methods but unfortunately I haven’t seen Fr. Fitzmyer’s name on Dei Verbum, Divino Afflante Spiritu, Providentissimus Deus, or mentioned even in any of Pope Benedict XVI’s writings about exegesis and hermeneutics (I do admit that I haven't read them all). Can you please show me in any of those documents where it says that I have to adopt Fr. Fitzmyer's ideas as my own or itemize all of those Protestant hermeneutical techniques I am supposed to use.”
This is another example of your self-reinforcing ignorance–even in reference to your own religious tradition. Fitzmyer walks you through the history of how the Magisterium came to embrace such methods.
4:48 PM, July 02, 2009
steve said...
Paul Hoffer said...
“In regards, to Fr. Fitzmyer, I do not disagree that the Catholic Church does recognize the value of historical criticism in exegesis, I merely do not agree with Fr. Fitzmyer’s views on it. The man does not recognize many of the events of the OT as historically accurate and contends that there are errors in the Bible. Perhaps such notions is in accord with your exegetical outlook, but I do not accept Fr. Fitzmyer’s views particularly since they devalue the role of Tradition, the concept that the Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures to be written, and that the Scriptures are inerrant.”
Fitzmyer is not a Catholic dissent, like Küng. He represents mainstream Catholic views of Scripture which have never been censured by the Vatican. The Vatican is in a position to crack down if it wanted to. His views would have been out of bounds in the days of Pius IX or Leo XIII, but not today.
12:17 PM, July 03, 2009
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